THINKing

Top 17 Tips For Developing Compelling Blog Ideas

Sometimes I have to really put on the thinking cap to come up with a blog idea.  Are you struggling with this, too? I’ve put together this post with the tips that have most helped me come up with solid ideas, as well as provided a few related articles you may want to peruse.

Take A Hint. I’m going to develop a post soon about website design based on a question I received from a reader at our Facebook fan page.
Start A Fight. Is there someone in your business who has opinions with which you disagree vehemently? Passion makes great posts.
Talk To The Expert. Is there someone in your business that you respect? Interview him or her. Chances are others would like to know what that expert is thinking, too.
Search The Dusty Archives. I often look at previous posts, pull five or six that have been overlooked and present them in a new post.
Go Serial. At the start of 2010, I began a weekly installment providing links to creativity-related items.
Lessons Learned. Has something happened in your personal or professional life that you learned from and can turn into a post?
Go Random. The link to the left takes you to a random idea generator. I just used it and was presented with these three random thoughts: transparent, musical, sex toy. I’ll get back to you later with the post idea that comes from that!
Be Historic. Write something on a figure from the early days of your profession like this piece I penned on PR pioneer Edward Bernays.
By The Numbers. Write a piece that gives 3, 5, 7, 9 or 11 tips in your area of expertise. As you can see, I like using odd numbers.
Cliff’s Notes. What have you been reading about? Develop a post that summarizes your reading and link off to your source material.
Go Supernatural. Select something from science fiction or horror and marry it with your business. I did it in a post called What Marketers Can Learn From Zombies.
Be Statistical. Look at your analytics to see what keywords are bringing in your readers. Post on a keyword-based topic.
Personal Best. Make a list of your best posts by topic.
What Would ____ Think? Look at your business through the eyes of another. For example: What Would Leonardo da Vinci Think About Facebook?
Reader Favorites. Ask your readers about their favorite resources or tools.
Weekly Riff. Take a topic and write something about it each day for a week.
Steal With Style. Have you read something recently that you really liked? Well, write a piece on the topic giving it your own unique spin.

Related Stories:

Top 10 Story Starter Tips For Blocked Bloggers

Writer’s Block

WIIFM?

45 Post Ideas That Always Generate Buzz

100 Ways To Find Ideas For Your Blog Posts

13 Ideas to Inspire Your Blog Content

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Top 11 Free Resources To Improve Your Blog’s Content

As part of our continuing series to help you in developing compelling content, today we provide you a list of the top 11 online resources to help you improve your writing skills.

The Elements of Style – there is no better resource for writers than William Strunk’s classic. I have a well-thumbed hard copy, but this online version covers the writing bases.

100 Useful Web Tools For Writers – Whether poet, biographer, journalist, blogger or technical writer, you’ll find a helpful tool in this list.

Problogger – Darren Rowse is one of the best, most successful bloggers on the planet. Problogger provides advice on everything from writing good headlines to how to come up with story ideas.

Poynter’s Fifty Writing Tools – For the auditory learner, there is Poynter’s index of podcasts that cover the nuts and bolts of writing.

Lifehack on Communications – I love Lifehack for its tips on a range of topics like productivity, technology and of course, communications.

Grammar Girl – Mignon Fogarty is Grammar Girl and she can explain split infinitives so simply that a Neanderthal could understand it.

Time To Write – Need inspiration? Well, here you go. This site is full of inspiration as well as tips to help writers along their way.

OWL – The OWL is Purdue University’s online writing lab that features free writing resources and instructional material.

Common Errors In English Usage – If you don’t know the difference between peak, peek and pique, then you need this site.

Grammar Slammer – Need help with capitalization, abbreviations or maybe your participle is dangling! Here it is.

Writing: The Online Community For Writers – Need to get advice from other writers? There are 819,000 members of this active forum.

In case you missed our initial posts on content development:

Five Key Elements To Creating Compelling Blog Content – I have been thinking a lot recently about creating compelling blog content, and at first blush, there seem to be a lot of barriers. But like getting over a barbed wire fence, you just have to step back for a minute and think through your approach so that you don’t catch something important on a barb.

How To Be A More Compelling Writer – If you can afford it, hiring a good writer for your blog is solid advice. If you can’t, then you need to become a better writer. A few simple things can help take your writing to the next level.

Great Images Make Content More Compelling – Good pictures alone are not enough. Photos can help draw attention to a post, keeping it from looking like a huge gray mass of words. But – to be most effective – the image must complement, or support the the story in some way.

WIIFM? - Today we’re going to take a look at WIIFM, or What’s In It For Me. You must answer some questions and perform a little research to find out what your readers or prospective readers truly want from your blog.

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Social Media Hub

We’re flattered to have been included as a featured blogger in the new social media hub, Social Media Informer. The site has just launched this week, and there is great content there from a diverse group of social media thought leaders.

Here’s what my pal, Tom Pick, at Webbiquity says about SMI,

SMI was developed by some of the same people as the popular B2B Marketing Zone b2b marketing portal. It also uses the same underlying Browse My Stuff technology, which enables publishers, PR agencies, corporations and other enterprises to build branded content aggregation hubs. For readers, SMI will aggregate high quality content; make it easy to navigate based on topic, source or date; and expose valuable niche content that might otherwise be overlooked.

This is going to be a great destination for people interested in high level social media thinking. So, check it out, soon.

Oh, and here are some of the other featured bloggers:

• Alex Blom
• Buzz Marketing for Technology
• Conversionation
• ConverStations
• Direct Marketing Observations
• FreshNetworks
• Idaconcpts
• Janet Fouts
• Kyle Lacy
• One Social Media
• Scott Gould
• Simon Mainwaring
• Socialized
• The Relationship Economy
• Webbiquity SMM
• WindMill Networking

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Top 19 Free Photo Sites For Bloggers

Our list of free photo resources has been a popular post since 2007. I noticed that one on the list had gone out of business and have found a few new ones. So, I wanted to bring you a new, improved list for 2010. Morguefile and Flickr Creative Commons are my favorites for truly free, not just royalty-free, images.

Please let me know if there are others you use that aren’t on our list.

MorgueFile

Flickr Creative Commons Service

Stock.Xchang

Image Base

Open Photo

FreeFoto

EveryStockPhoto

FreePhotosBank

Image After

Studio 25

Free Stock Photos

PD Photo

Free Images

Stock Vault

Free Digital Photos

Free Range Stock

Unprofound

Photo Rogue

Free Pixels

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Compelling Content

Recently, THINKing has been looking at ways to develop more compelling content. Below we’ve compiled our posts into an easy to navigate form.

Five Key Elements To Creating Compelling Blog Content – I have been thinking a lot recently about creating compelling blog content, and at first blush, there seem to be a lot of barriers. But like getting over a barbed wire fence, you just have to step back for a minute and think through your approach so that you don’t catch something important on a barb.

How To Be A More Compelling Writer – If you can afford it, hiring a good writer for your blog is solid advice. If you can’t, then you need to become a better writer. A few simple things can help take your writing to the next level.

Great Images Make Content More Compelling – Good pictures alone are not enough. Photos can help draw attention to a post, keeping it from looking like a huge gray mass of words. But – to be most effective – the image must complement, or support the the story in some way.

WIIFM? - Today we’re going to take a look at WIIFM, or What’s In It For Me. You must answer some questions and perform a little research to find out what your readers or prospective readers truly want from your blog.

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Great Images Make Content More Compelling

You are probably wondering what this photo has to do with this post. Well, in part one of this series, Five Key Elements To Creating Compelling Content, our friend, Rubbermaid blogger  Jim Dietzel, laid out his five key elements for creating compelling content. Number 3 was “pictures are good.”

Our digital colleague, Rodger Johnson from GetSocialPR, also thinks that imagery can kick your content up a notch. He says use compelling images to support the story, a lesson he learned from his journalism days that still works today.

The photo above may be interesting, but it doesn’t really go with this post. So, good pictures are not enough. Photos can help draw attention to a post, keeping it from looking like a huge gray mass of words. But – to be most effective – the image must complement, or support the the story in some way.

If you are going to use photos, you also must respect copyright law. Don’t just do a Google search and use the images. They may be copyright protected. We did a piece sometime back about some free photo resources that you may want to revisit.

Below are a few more related posts on the use of images in your blog.

An Introduction To Using Images On Blogs

Finding Compelling Flickr Images

Using Images Legally On Your Blog

Using Images To Take Your Posts To A New Level

Why Images Are Vital To Modern Blogs

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How To Be A More Compelling Writer

We’re examining the ways to make your blog more compelling.  A number of Twitterati responded to my request for their ideas. The quality of writing was on their minds:

As we heard from Jim Dietzel, a Fortune 1000 blogger for Rubbermaid, “Hire a good writer. Seriously.”

Colleague Tom Pick of Webbiquity tells us we must do a better job in naming our posts, using compelling headlines like “Common Myths of…” or “Mistakes to Avoid in…”

Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer thinks we need to consider the way we approach the content. He says to think like a movie trailer, not a journalist. Compelling content isn’t reporting. It’s entertaining.

If you can afford it, hiring a good writer for your blog is solid advice. If you can’t, then you need to become a better writer. A few simple things can help take your writing to the next level.  Let’s address a few of these basic ideas that we have tackled here in THINKing previously.

Write Tight -  My first news editor hammered one thing into my consciousness: write tight. Leave out the frills, just present the facts and move on. You don’t have to create an act of literature every time you sit down to write. But remember, as Jason Falls points out, simply reporting is not enough. Don’t edit out the entertainment while editing out the extraneous.

Tell Me A Story – Since the dawn of time mankind has been a sucker for a story. We may be wearing synthetics now instead of skins, but that one truth has not changed. Storytelling is a way to add some passion, interest and drama to your blogging.

Tell Me A Story About Me – Well, it’s all about me after all, isn’t it? Don’t tell a self-serving story. Tell one that speaks to the self-interest of the reader.

Get Active -  My lovely bride and mystery novelist par excellence, Terry Hoover, is the queen of the vivid verb. Peruse the first chapter of her book, Double Dead, to see what I mean.

Storystarters – Sometimes you are just stuck for an idea or an approach to a blog post.  Leap those obstacles with these methods.

Do you have some thoughts on compelling content? Well, what are you waiting for…tell us!

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Too Much Social, Not Enough Sales?

Is social media wearing you out and getting in the way of your real work? It’s not bad enough that you have to keep up with a blog, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendfeed, Youtube and maybe Plaxo, but every day I’m being asked to join yet another social network. There are hundreds of them, it seems. I’ve said no to Viadeo, no to Friendster, no to MySpace, and by-bye to Goodreads.

How many social networks is too many to handle? As in every other facet of business, I believe focus is the answer. Pick three to four that make sense for you and your organization and do them right.

If you are spending all of your time blogging, Twittering, adding posts on your company Facebook page, when are you going to have time to keep the business afloat? After all, the first rule of business is to stay in business. To do this, you must make money.

How many networks are you trying to keep afloat? Have you jettisoned any? Which ones? What is working – or not working – for you?

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Tweeta20 – A Non-Profit Social Media Pilot Project

On Tuesday, May 11, nine Charlotte social media folks and I will spend an hour trying to raise money for Thompson Child & Family Focus, an organization that has spent nearly 125 years providing education, treatment and support for children traumatized by sexual abuse, domestic violence or rampant neglect.

During Thompson’s annual meeting at noon May 11, we will sit at a Twitter Table and encourage our followers to Tweet A $20 or more. Each contributor of $20 or more will be entered to win two tickets to WICKED at Charlotte, NC’s Ovens Auditorium.

We’re using the hashtag #Tweeta20 in all of our social media postings  so we can keep up with the social stream, primarily from our Charlotte area social followers.

How can you help? I’m glad you asked.

• Follow Thompson on Twitter @thompsoncff
• Become a Facebook fan of Thompson Child & Family Focus
• Share news on your blog, in your tweets or Facebook status updates about the promotion and use the #Tweeta20 hashtag
• Follow our Tweets from noon to 1 p.m. on May 11 and please RT our #Tweeta20 tweets
• Go ahead and #Tweeta20. We’re taking donations!
• Send any other ideas you have to tweak our #Tweeta20 promotion.

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Hidden Gems

OK, I’ll admit it: since Labor Day is approaching I’m taking the lazy way out today and dredging up some excellent old posts that for some reason didn’t get any traction. Have a great holiday.

Fighting For The Middle Ground

Tell Me A Story

I Spy: Top 7 Links For Online PR Espionage

Customer Diss-Service

Your Personal Brand

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