Effective Blog Content: How To Mix It Up

Is this scenario familiar? Your blog is up and running, and you’ve been steadily contributing several posts a week. But out of nowhere, you become completely tapped out of ideas. When you launched this valuable marketing tool and were fueled by excitement and fresh insight, you could never have imagined having this problem. As time goes on, though, your blog content might begin to suffer — if you don’t have a standby pool of posts.

Honest bloggers will tell you that it’s challenging to produce fresh content day after day. But to be effective and engage your community, your blog must continue to be interesting, informative and entertaining.

So to be a successful business blogger, you must have a storehouse of various types of blog content that you can post, so that when your well of ideas becomes low, you’ll have a stockpile of fresh ones to use.

Here are some ideas for post types that have proven effective:

• Use questions. Does your website have an FAQ? Does your sales team have a list of commonly-asked questions from customers? Use these queries to develop blog posts.
• Share knowledge. Generate short articles that educate your readers about your industry, sharing relevant blog postings from thought leaders or informative white papers. Don’t forget to include a link to the original source.
• Enlist feedback. Instead of mailing a survey, develop one within your blog content that solicits ideas from your customers. Keep it brief, and use the information to build future posts.
• Illustrate how something is done. Take a process or idea from your products or services and use blog posts as how-to guides.
• Repurpose existing content. Blog followers don’t read every piece posted. Further, most people are hard-pressed for time these days and will often just scan a blog. So don’t be afraid to reuse information that you’ve already discussed, but give it a new slant.

Build a backlog of posts and mix up their content types, and you’ll never run dry on blog content. Even the best bloggers come up empty sometimes, but you can prepare for those days.

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