In the last post, I suggested I’d be demonstrating the process I use to come up with ideas for blog posts using some clients of mine as examples. I’m not going to point you in the direction of their websites (as most people want their site visitors to believe they are coming up with the blog content for themselves), so what Ill do is give you 3 examples of particular industries that actual clients of mine work in.

Client Industry – Project Management

Possibly one of the easiest industries to find ideas for. Pretty much anything you care to think of to do with business is ripe for making an association with project management – which is what we wish to be doing, so we can come up with a fresh blog (or Facebook / Twitter) post that is triggered by something that at first appears unconnected.

And you’ll almost certainly find that there are more specifically-relevant things you can utilise than you would expect. For instance, my particular client has a speciality within the Agile project management sphere. And last week The Times newspaper had a whole pullout section focusing on Agile practices. OK, this is a fairly extreme example, but I have no doubt I’ll be able to find several things I could use as the basis for an article in today’s newspaper, too, something I shall look at now.

And indeed, having flicked through today’s copy of The Times, there are quite a few things that immediately strike me as providing material for blog posts:

1) In the Business section, there’s a story about the company Innocent Drinks suffering a massive fall in profits, despited a record number of sales. This could easily be turned into a blog posts about having to keep an eye on the bottom line when expanding into different markets, as Innocent are currently doing through their owners, Cocal-Cola.

2) Of course, The Times has a good reputation for its business pages, so there are likely to be quite a few articles of relevance to this particular client on a daily basis, inlcuding another article about the supermarket firm Morrisons having to renege on a price promise it made earlier this year – leading to a possible article about how to handle rising costs such that you don’t end up with egg on your face about things you said previously.

3) But the whole point of the process I adopt is that the inspiration can come from anywhere, with associations being made from seemingly unconnected elements in order to provide the source material. There’s an article in the news section about some doctors being able to earn £100,000 a year just working on the weekends – stimulating a thought process about the best use of time for consumers (patients) as well as providers (doctors), as plenty of people will be keen to see a doctor at the weekend so it appears the market is working quite efficiently in this instance, thus showing a successful project at work.

4) In the letters page, there are arguments for and against the British Summer Time practice of putting the clocks forwards and backwards at different times of the year – again providing potential source material for an article debating the pros and cons from a project management perspective.

Of course, you don’t have to read The Times to find this kind of inspiration. Nor do you have to be working in an industry that lends itself quite so nicely to piggybacking on multiple news stories. So in my next post, I’ll look at a different industry and add in some other sources for getting ideas.