Blogging for the New Year Part 2 – What to blog about?

This leads on from the previous article about why to blog. Once we’ve answered that question we next need to figure out what to blog about.

It’s very important to define this before you start writing your blog.

Knowing exactly what you’re going to blog about it an important part of starting a blog. You might say, “I know exactly what I want to blog about – Film!”. But that’s not enough. Film is a very broad topic. You need to really narrow down the area within Film that you want to blog about.

Courtesy freeimages.co.uk

So, in this case, maybe the topic for your blog could be New Wave French Cinema! A good example of a film blog with a very refined focus is Wise Kwai’s Thai Film Journal.

There are several techniques you can use to help when you’re trying to pick a topic. What works for me is to think about what my target audience wants. In the case of this blog the target audience is made up of my clients and my potential clients. I think I know what they want when they come to me in the real world – advice and hel;p in getting their business online and using the internet in their business.

Another thing that helped me decide on this topic was that this blog will help me to realise a real world goal. My goal – to get more clients.

Lastly, I’m interested in the Internet and using the Internet for business and I think that will help!

Once a topic has been selected we need to decide on what we’re going to blog about within that topic. I’m going to use a few different approaches to help me with this. Here’s a couple of the ideas I have:

  • News stories
    The TV, radio and newspapers should all be a rich source of material for your blog
  • Magazines
    Industry magazines will have plenty of articles that might be of interest to your readers
  • Common issues
    Often different customers have the same questions and concerns dealing with these in the blog will help both customer and me
  • Tutorials
    Tutorials are good way to show you know what you’re about, and they offer something of value to your reader
  • Top Ten!
    Top tens are old favourite of many blogs – they are relatively easy to write and they are easy to read

The next step is to work out a schedule for blogging.