Hot Ideas & Hot Air

Tornado Marketing posted it’s 100th blog yesterday!! Time to break out the premium coffee (I would say champagne…but I still have to get some work done today!)

Writing our 100th post is definitely a milestone worth celebrating, but it is also cause for reflection. I spent a little time looking back at those 100 posts and got to thinking about the whole idea of blogging. There are hundreds of reasons to start a blog, and often those reasons can keep you going for a while - but what happens when that initial ‘umph’ runs out? What keeps us motivated to blog every day (or at least almost every day)? There are hundreds of articles out there about why you should blog - biggest among them probably being SEO - but there are noticeably less about how to get ideas for your blog. For example, the Tornado Marketing Blog is a blog about marketing. But, what does that mean? What topics does that allow us to talk about? For the Tornado Marketing blog, the answer is simple: Whatever we believe is important to know about marketing or business, and that we think our readers would find useful. If you look through our past posts, they have covered everything from creating your core message to using Twitter for business. But, just because we know what we want to write about doesn’t mean it is always easy to come up with things to actually write about.

With that in mind, we have put together a list of 5 things we do, and you can do, to make coming up with material for your blog a little easier:

1. Save articles you find interesting: If you see a post from someone else, an article in the newspaper, or a youtube video that you like, save it! Create a folder on your computer that you put them all into, that way you can go back and find them when you are struggling for an idea. (But always make sure to credit your sources if you are quoting something you’ve read or seen.)

2. Start wrting: Sometimes it takes a while for a post to develop, you have to work your way through all the ’stuff’ in your head to get to the meat of the idea. Often, I will just start writing the post, and worry about grammar, spelling and clarity later. Once I get my main ideas down, it is always easier to clean it up, rather than trying to ‘clean as you go’.

3. Enjoy what you are talking about: This should go without saying, but if you are writing a post about something you don’t care about, it is going to be a lot more difficult to come up with material. If you really don’t like your topic - change it!

4. Pose a question: Sometimes, despite everything else, you can’t come up with something to talk about. In this case, I will pose a question - favorite marketing quote, motto for living life, etc. These questions do a great job of starting a conversation with your readers, generating some buzz and getting your blog some comments!

5. Take a break: When your mind is cluttered with everything that you need to be doing today, it can be difficult to clear it enough to let yourself be creative. If this happens, I recommend taking a 5 minute break, going and getting some coffee, taking a deep breath and clearing your head. Once you have let yourself relax a bit, the words will usually start flowing more freely.

Now that I have given you my 5 tips for creating blog material - get to writing! If you want, you can get things started by leaving us a comment answering: What tips do you have for when you have writer’s block?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 at 12:58 pm and is filed under Branding Brilliance, Small Business Online, Tips and Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.