Intergration

OK, so following on from my previous 3 posts about getting inspiration for what to write on your own blog, Facebook, Twitter etc. – here’s another couple of example client industries, with another fantastic source of potential ideas.

The 2 clients I’m looking at are a firm of solicitors and a restaurant.

The solicitors firm is a fairly easy one to find content inspiration for, as there are literally loads and loads of news stories everyday relating to legal issues. But outside of the news, there are plenty of other places you can find ideas, such as Wikipedia.

For example, a Wikipedia search for the word “solicitors”, gives a page dedicated to explaining various facets of the profession, including a whole range of links to other relevant pages. It’s this extra linking that can provide most of your ideas, as there are so many other relevant pieces of information available that can be turned into a post or series of posts from your own point of view.

Looking at the restaurant industry, Wikipedia gives us plenty of inspiration regarding such things as the history of restaurants (where you could presumably slot yourself in somewhere along the line), the number of restaurants around the world etc, along with a large range of links to other relevant pages that can provide even more ideas for you to work on.

And then we come to the king of the internet – Google itself. having seen what we can do with Wikipedia, Google News etc, we can translate these ideas into performing a simple Google search in order to find ideas to write about. Obviously a simple keyword phrase such as “restaurants” or “solicitors” will bring up the websites of potential competitors, so I recommend going a bit more in-depth here; and in paticular making use of Google’s “predictive search” facility, which will show you currently popular searches when you type words into the search box.

For instance, the word “restaurants” has plenty of suggestions for what other people are searching for, including such things as “restaurant reservations” – which could inspire a post about top tips for securing a reservation at particular restaurants.

So there’s plenty of methods for finding ideas – especially for those of you who’ve read the book I mentioned in my first post, A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Webb Young – and I hope you’ve found some inspiration of your own in theses pages.

Continuing from my post the other day, in the next 2 posts I’m going to look at some other client industries, finding the inspiration from places that aren’t a daily newspaper such as The Times.

First up, Google News, and the industries I’ll be looking at are an online retailer of a specific GPS tracking product for cats or dogs; and a firm operating in the building / house repair market.

This is obviously similar to the newspaper idea, but it’s so much more immediate and has the great advantage of being searchable. For example, a search for “cats” brings up several relevant news stories that could be turned into a post:

1) Apparently it’s National Cat Day (in the US) – fairly obvious how we can utilise this for a blog post.

2) A group of people trying to track down possible cat theives have put together a map of where cats have gone missing from in Ipswich (a story that is almost tailor-made for our product).

3) Also – and this is the kind of thing that happens more frequently than you’d imagine once you’re attuned to it – a couple of weeks ago there was a BBC2 series entitled “Cat Watch”, which followed cats around all day (the cats wearing mini cameras to record their movements). Another fairly obvious association we can make for this product.

Regarding the building trade client, another Google News search (for “damp proofing”) provides the following stories for inspiration:

1) A parent in Sutton Coldfield is concerned by mould in her home which could damage her children – something a damp proof course could fix.

2) A funny story about a bridge with no damp proofing being recounted at the Scottish International Storytelling Festival.

3) And, of course, there are innumerable TV programmes that are based on renovating houses or building a dream home from scratch, such as Grand Designs, Homes Under the Hammer, DIY SOS etc.

So it’s not difficult to see how we can use Google News and TV programmes to provide us with ideas for posts – even short ones including links to the original story for things like Twitter.

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.

 

One of the issues I come up against most often when I’m telling clients they should be writing new content for their blogs on a frequent basis, is the problem of what to write. And, beyond that, what to write that is actually going to be interesting and engaging for the reader. (Of course, this issue isn’t exclusive to blog posts, with Facebook, Twitter etc posts casusing the same problem for most people – with the same solution, as below).

Once we’ve gone through – and rejected – the usual standbys of:

– corporate info (yawn)
– industry news (yawn)
– product info (essentially a recreation of what’s already on their site, though can be useful done the right way – see below)

we’re left with the sort of thing that most people might come up with when asked to put together a list of titles for possible blog posts that would interest their potential clients:

– Top Ten xyz
– Funny Stories about xyz
– Unusual and interesting info about xyz
– Links to other sites that feature info about xyz
etc

All perfectly suitable and worthwhile topics, but even then there’s usually a bit of a stumbling block between coming up with a suitable title and actually being able to populate the article with content.

So I recommend a particular mindset that works for me and many other people who “write to order” on a regular basis – which is to realise that ideas are simply combinations of previously-existing elements, in order to develop something new (in this case, an idea for an article).

I’ve set out the process I use below, and if you’re interested in working this way for yourself I thoroughly recommend you read a book called “A Technique for Producing Ideas” by James Webb Young – a gold standard classic in the world of advertising. (Though quite short and based on teachings from 70 years ago, it stands up as being as useful and relevant in today’s digital world as it was when newspaper coupons were a marketer’s main tool).

The process I use can be summarised as:

1) Absorb information about your own subject. This is something I do on an ongoing basis through knowledge of the products /services on offer. The internet is obviously quite a useful source of info for other things relating to the particular products / services on offer – eg a site such as https://www.searchenginenews.com/ provides lots of relevant information about SEO.

2) Absorb information about everything else. Seems quite a difficult task, but really what I mean is to read / watch / listen to lots of other things that are seemingly unconnected with your own subject, though such activities as reading newspapers, watching factual television programmes, browsing the internet in a “see where it takes you” fashion etc.

3) Make connections and associations between the 2. This is the key element for coming up with ideas – the making of connections and associations between previously-existing elements in order to come up with something new. This stage of the process can also include elements of “doodling” or “daydreaming”, as it often features the writing down snatches of ideas and simply allowing your thoughts to wander, based on the information absorbed in the first 2 stages.

If you’ve read the James Webb Young book referred to above, you’ll know that he recommends abandoning the thought process at some stage, in order for the subconscious mind to take over. I, too, find this a very useful method for coming up with future ideas. But for the purposes of writing an article at a particular moment, I simply use the 3 stages outlined above.

In my next post, I’ll be giving a practical demonstration of how to go about this process, using the products and services of clients of mine as examples.

A recent giveaway section in The Times newspaper (www.thetimes.co.uk) was called “Successful Modern Entrepreneurship”. It featured mostly interviews with UK business owners discussing how they manage to run their business successfully, whilst also making time for other activities in a work / life balance manner.

Several of the interviewees discussed how they were not only the MD / CEO of their business, but that they were also the people primarily responsible for marketing and promoting the company to others. This is a far from unusual situation – one I’ve come across very many times over the years I’ve been helping businesses to promote themselves over the internet.

As well as several other useful tips, one of the main ones that caught my eye was the instruction to “Do your marketing” – featured in their Top Ten list of things to do in order to achieve the best balance for running a successful operation. Their recommendation is based on: “..marketing takes time to work. Relationships take time to develop. Customers take time to know, like and trust you. Be the one who shows up regularly, not just when you’re desperate..” (As suggested by productivity guru, Grace Marshall).

Relating this to social media and blog writing, it’s clear that the recommendation would be to ensure you actually keep on top of these elements of your marketing, by doing them on a regular basis. I’m well aware that many businesspeople will concentrate on “day to day” activities and continually put things like updating their blog and posting on Facebook to the bottom of the “to do” list – often performing this action so often that they eventually decide they’re never going to have enough time to write anything worthwhile, so they may as well simply give up.

Hence the enormous number of “ghost town” blogs and social media accounts that serve little purpose other than to clutter up the web with nothing of any value. And certainly, an empty blog or social media presence is not especially likely to encourage potential clients to contact you. So if there’s one thing I always say is the most important factor in terms of maintaining your presence online, it is to actually do it. Write the blog, Facebook post, Tweet and get them online so people can see you actually do exist and are not only active, but worth contacting.

Making time for this isn’t something you should put off – as reinforced in the newspaper pullout referenced above – as it should be viewed as an essential part of your business activity, rather than something you can leave for another time. (And, of course, if you feel you really don’t have the time to do it yourself, you can always utilise the services of someone like me to keep on top of things for you!).