What can I write about? The answer is all around you!

Believe it or not, there is plenty of material to blog about, if only you stopped to look at it properly.

I frequently get asked the question ‘What can I write about?’. So I gently start to ask them questions about their business or project, and lo and behold, tonnes of suitable blogging material comes spilling out.

Focus on you!

One focus of what you write about could be yourself within the business. This is a difficult concept for those who aren’t natural extraverts or like to hide away from the big, bad world. People love stories about people – I suppose it’s ingrained in us to want to listen to gossip – and if you can slightly sensationalise it (come on, we all like to exaggerate a story to make it sound better), then it will become all the more exciting and readable.

It’s like a conversation

Another tip is to write like you’re having a conversation with someone over coffee. Think of yourself in a nice, relaxed café sipping a frothy cappuccino with a huge slice of chocolate cake to divert your attention, and then start talking. Talk to the computer, talk to a doll or teddy bear sitting in the seat next to you, talk to yourself in the mirror, talk as if you’re talking to your best friend. Then capture all that and put it into a post!

Posts now should be comfortable, communicating and conversational. Leave in all the little extra bits that make it a conversation, such as ‘of course’, ‘well…’, ‘umm perhaps’, and other similar extraneous bits we certainly wouldn’t have included in our essays at school! But this is how we speak, so why not speak through words to your readers?

Look at your emails

I bet you’re constantly answering questions about your business, and they are probably the same ones all the time. Wouldn’t it be better to put these into a blog post, and when somebody asks direct them to the blog – it would save you a lot of time. Treat your blog as an extension to your Frequently Asked Questions page, or as part of your Customer Service format, it would look better if they could find their answers in a full and comprehensive blog archive.

Of course this would be constantly updated as you develop your business, customers become more diverse, and the questions become more complicated. All excellent potential blogging material.

What’s happened lately?

This can be adapted from any press releases you put out, any contracts you have won, any projects you have finished satisfactorily and the customer had provided excellent feedback, any personal successes or lessons you have learned along the way. If you think nobody would be interested in reading this, you’d be surprised. If it is informative, educational, entertaining, extraordinary, unusual, exciting, funny or whatever, I’m sure it could be adapted into a ‘conversation with your readers’ like I said above.

Go with the flow

Tuning your brain into what I call ‘blogging mode’ won’t happen overnight, but after a while you’ll soon start to see potential blogging material everywhere. A comment made by somebody at a networking meeting, a news bulletin on the TV or radio, a tweet or Facebook conversation, or even what another blogger has written – I’m sure you will have a point of view to express that somebody would appreciate! Your blog will always appreciate what you want to say, unquestioningly, so why not fulfill its appetite for new content?

–oo0oo–

About the author:
Alice Elliott is a online marketer and blogger, who runs the Fairy Blog Mother, an educational website resource that trains, explains and creates awareness about blogs. Find out what she can offer you regarding blogs and online marketing at http://fairyblogmother.co.uk