I know, I know. You’ve heard it a thousand times: “you should blog!” Yet somehow you still have NO clue what to write about nor do you ever seem to find the time (let alone the desire) to get started. Believe me, I understand. We hear it all the time and it’s a common problem. Let us give you an edge with some fresh new ideas. No more excuses! read the full story...
25 things you can write about on your company blog
- Feature your customers via real pictures, quotes and stories
- Make people laugh with videos - Share a collection of hilarious YouTube videos within a relevant theme. For example, if you are a retailer trying to drive traffic to your site around the holidays, you could post great “Christmas Gone Wrong” videos.
- Pose a question- If you’re looking to engage your audience, this is the way to do it. Who said you have to know all the answers in order to blog?
- Introduce your employees
- Do a photo blog post - Use an app like GramGrab to make your Instagram and Pinterest photos into content your audience will love. Remember to give proper photo credit when due if you’re not using your own images.
- Give your opinion on industry news - And remember: an opinion that not everyone agrees with is OK. In fact, sometimes it’s a good thing.
- Show a visual evolution of your website - Make people smile by using Way Back Machine to take screenshots of your site over time.
- Share a personal story - the most viral content on the web is content that people react to emotionally. Share a struggle, triumph or endearing story that will make any reader want to share it.
- Upload a video from your smartphone - When it comes to your blog, an occasional amateur video is acceptable.
A frequently updated company blog can accomplish several goals, including improved search engine rankings; driving brand awareness; increased website traffic; and helping position your business as an industry leader. But it’s not always easy to come up with ideas for blog posts. Here are six ways that might help. read the full story...
WordPress launched The Daily Post way back in December 2010, to inspire bloggers to live up to their title and actually post blog posts in 2011. But not only to post posts, but to post all the time—daily, as you might have gathered. Daily Post presents a prompt from the question-and-answer social network of sorts Plinky. If you want to write about it, write about it on your blog. Then you have a new post.
But let’s back up a minute. Posts are good. A solid blogging foundation is even better. Here are two important points of blogging:
1. Your blog needs to have a point.
Approach your blog like a magazine editor. Magazines are all dedicated to a subject. Your blog can encompass content from a relatively broad subject, but topics should have some sort of underlying theme. (Take this blog, which is about interactive space. There are posts about technology, social media, and company news, but it’s all under the scope of interactive.)
It’s fine to dedicate your blog to an extremely specific topic—we could very easily write about blue Japanese gadgets weighing under three ounces with eight hour battery life—but make sure that topic is substantial enough to actually write about weekly.
2. Your blog needs recent content.
Here’s where the new posts come in. New posts show your dedication, which keep your blog relevant, which in turn boost your credibility or your organization’s credibility. Think of the poor, deserted blogs littered throughout virtual space. It’s always the same story: started with hope and enthusiasm, abandoned due to lack of interest. Don’t let this happen to your blog. Abandoned blogs make everyone sad. read the full story...
At one point in time, fanatic internet users wrote online diaries, chronological musings of … whatever, really. That practice gave way to the blog, a series of reverse chronological musings of … whatever. And finally, we arrive at the microblog, a touch point for a person’s general miscellany.
Microblogging is especially fun because:
- It ignores the single-subject blogging convention, so go ahead and post … whatever
- It’s short, because we all have Twitter-sized attention spans these days (Twitter being perhaps the ultimate and most micro version of microblogging)
- It’s very little work—it’s more than acceptable to pull content from somewhere else and cite the source.
Tumblr is surely enjoying a shining moment as microblogging darling of the moment with an impressive growing number of users. Two Tumblr outages within a 48-hour period of time certainly speak to its popularity (or faulty servers).
Tumblr is a prevailing choice for microblogging because it is easy to use—bare-bones registration and simple methods for uploading specific content, be it your text, pictures, video, or audio—and offers a quasi-social aspect, allowing users to “follow” one another, a la Twitter.
Though Posterous has given Tumblr some contention within the microblogging platform sphere, the latter is the clear leader, boasting usage from Newsweek and ELLE, clearly two of the hippest news and fashion publications, respectively.
But like any social channel, microblogging becomes valuable when you consider what it does and what it will do for you. Start conversation? Showcase cute pictures of baby animals? Or take the advice of Mark Coatney, editor of the Newsweek Tumblr: “‘Just go and do whatever you want with it.’ Which is, I think, the only way it really works.”
I know, I know. You’ve heard it a thousand times: “you should blog!” Yet somehow you still have NO clue what to write about nor do you ever seem to find the time (let alone the desire) to get started. Believe me, I understand. We hear it all the time and it’s a common problem. Let us give you an edge with some fresh new ideas. No more excuses! 