You’ve decided that yes, you should be writing a blog for your business. You know it makes sense and that it is a great way to share with the world your expertise.

Congratulations! We totally support you in this venture.

But….. What in the name of sanity are you going to write about? Where can you get business blogging ideas from?

We can’t physically get you started, but we can offer some broad ideas on what you could use as a starting point.

10 Subject Ideas For Your Business Blog:

Calendars: Searching for ‘blog ideas’ online will bring up suggestions to create a content calendar. And for good reason – planning always helps in business, and tying your blogs in with specific dates, or days, can help keep you relevant. This is specially pertinent if you are selling products – you know how important planning is to get sales up for Christmas for example. But it can apply to those of you providing services as well. For ourselves, there are technology days – Computer Security Day, World Password Day; have a search online to see if there are any ‘days’ that fit into, or can be adapted to your niche.

Real-Time: Throwing ‘planning’ out the window here. We’ve had blog posts come up on page one because we reacted to a breaking news story, then wrote and published a blog with relevant content to that news story within hours of it hitting the headlines. Not always possible to react that quickly, we know; but still worth your while keeping an ear to the ground for anything getting mass coverage to see if you can write something that fits with it.

History: Nobody knows your company better than you do. You have trained, you have experience, you have lived it. Share your insider knowledge by either writing about the history of your discipline, or how you personally got to where you are at, or how things within your industry have changed over the years.

Creativity: Not for everyone this, but a blog post doesn’t have to be text based. Can you share a video, or create a gallery of photos or images? We used National Poetry Day to, ehm, write a poem, that we then created into a video and shared on social media. For our Christmas post we shared the Top 10 Christmas Jumpers For The IT Department (also, see below for Top Numbers).

Guests: Got business partners? Suppliers? People who compliment your business? Maybe they could be persuaded to write you a guest blog? You can entice them with a promise of a link back to their website and if you can also get them to link back to you it’s a win-win on the SEO front.

Case Studies: Acknowledging there is the issue of client confidentiality here, but for most businesses there will be the manoeuvrability to write about a problem presented by a customer and how you went about resolving that issue. This gives you the scope to share your business acumen as well as ‘naturally’ splatter your blog with relevant keywords. It also provides the opportunity for internal linking back to your products or services pages.

Top Numbers: We’re talking Top 100, Top 10, Top 5 – the most obvious example being this post that you are reading – or we have recently published Five Free Security Tips and The 12 Days of Online Security. If you are selling products you can do the Top ‘X’ best selling products of the month/season. For services, the Top ‘X’ tips or advice on solving a problem you provide a solution for (see also ‘free’ advice below).

Interviews: In a similar vein to Case Studies, is there someone you can interview – whom you can ask questions that maybe your client base are asking? For example, if you have a supplier, ask them more about their product, how it solves people’s problems, why it’s a good idea to use this product or service. You can also consider asking long-standing, loyal customers if they would be willing to answer a few questions about why they keep using your company. Again, you could also get a link or two from such a blog giving you those extra SEO bonus points.

‘Free’ Advice: When we have run workshops on Blogging for Business this one elicits the most scepticism – why would you share with the world the secrets of your trade so that people can just read your blog and go off and do the job themselves? And doesn’t this give ideas to your competitors? Not if you are canny enough. The idea here is to sow the seeds, not spell out exactly what you should be doing. It demonstrates your in-depth knowledge and offers a first-stage helping hand which results in building trust with your audience. They may find the solution within your blog and not need to call upon you there and then – but having found you to be so helpful they are more likely to return to you when they next need the services that you provide.

Company News: We’re not talking about Bob bringing doughnuts in for the third time this week, although thank you Bob. That can be shared, but probably best to remain on social media. We’re thinking more about Industry Awards, employees passing relevant qualifications, or any charity events that you are undertaking. Sharing this type of content demonstrates the ‘human’ side of your business, and if you have managed to secure sponsors for an event, you can point those wonderful people back to your blog so that they can follow your progress.

Blogging for business takes time and effort, but it can reap rewards if embraced within your overall marketing strategy. We hope that the 10 blogging ideas we’ve listed will give you the inspiration to get cracking, but if you need any further help do get in touch and we’ll see what we can do.