Bloggers Block? Tips for new ideas

Yes we are all told by Search engine optimisation gurus to fill our sites with compelling content so that we become ‘more Wikipedia’ for our own industry than a shop selling products or services. Strike us down if we would ever dare mention that we sell something on our websites. Yet sitting in front of the PC with Bloggers block and; wandering, for what seems like an eternity, what to write about next hits every one of us at some point.

So here are a few ideas to help you get your consistent content strategy moving.

Swallow the frog and start already!

Just start writing the first thing that comes into your head, and you now have started at least and you know what I was pondering over, once you start typing your subconscious mind goes to work thinking of ideas.

Reframing:

Think about your corny mate the one who is always telling corny jokes, where does he get his material? There is no such thing as a new joke, comedians know this to be true, it’s just they change the words and circumstances to fit either a more modern situation, or the people and things, if you digest jokes they have the same basic elements.

This is apparently the oldest Joke in the world:

A man buys a slave and takes him home he returns the next day and says to the trader:

“I need to complain about this slave, he’s dead” The trader seems indignant and replies:

 “Well he’s never done that before I assure you!”

Didn’t Monty Python do a version of this joke centuries later?

Please don’t start turning your blog into a cheesy joke board; it’s just my way of sneaking a cheeky pun in. What I mean is; worry not about whether you seem to be writing about the same underlying subject all the time, your subject put in different ways will always be of interest to those who need the information.

I always look forward to Frank Rambauskus email newsletter, he writes about cold calling and the devastating effects it has on Sales people in modern times and this has been his subject matter for years, but each time he frames it differently, and I get something new from his correspondence each week.

What happened this week?

Try to think of a circumstance where you have helped someone this week in your work and relate that story in your blog like when I spoke with a client recently about targeting;

I asked him who his target market was, and I think he was used to the question and he believed he had answered it succinctly; he said it was young men and woman early twenties who are in between jobs and need a gap year, to attend their TEFL (Teach English as a Foreign Language) courses in Thailand from his website which we are proud to say we built as well.

One of the best things that come with age is wisdom and tact; I still have my imagination so I can be gratuitously violent without hurting anyone or facing legal proceedings and Jail. In a meeting I often start to daydream and in my reverie I often end up shooting everyone up with a sub machine gun with blood splattered everywhere like a Tarantino movie for my client’s crimes to obviousness. <Ahem> back to reality:

I tactfully told him that he was definitely on the right track, but he must drill much deeper to think about where these people are to be found online, like on Travel groups on Facebook and is there any joint ventures he can do with very popular travel bloggers and perhaps a link with Western universities.

Facts and figures

Research always helps a blank mind, you can pull up market research facts and figures on your industry and add your review in a blog, it also forces you to look and digest facts and figures that you may not have really wanted to. Remember in school when our teachers made us write reviews of books to see if we really read them or not?

Lists:

Have you ever thought of a list of your favourite websites or peripheral companies you use and a review of why they are useful to you, this will give plenty of link love to your favourite authors and they may in return give you the link love back, hopefully one of them has a few thousand followers on Twitter like me, then you could see a few hundred new visitors to your blog.

 Got a website and struggling with traffic? Contact me, buy me a coffee and I’ll see how I can help.

Alan.