Guest post by: Peggy Emch ^[1]

Businesses often have things to say which people need to read but the topics aren’t always mind blowing.

Let’s face it, not every blog post or article is mesmerizing, riveting, charming, or moving. This doesn’t diminish their importance, though.

Succeeding at business requires reading and, these days, it often also requires writing. In such a competitive small business market, business owners are finding it valuable to write and blog about the things they know in order to stand out above the crowd.

But what do you do when the business or service you are promoting is not something you think anybody will want to read about?

Really boring (but important) blog topics include:

• Accounting
• Insurance
• Payroll
• Retirement Planning
• Time Tracking

As you can see, these are important services. Business people use them every day and occasionally need to learn more about them. But write about them? Blog about them? Really?

Why Write Blog Posts Anyway?

There are a three main reasons why a business would want to write informative articles and set up a blog:

1. To help educate customers about specific products.
2. To establish company representatives as authorities in the field in order to build a strong reputation.
3. To offer a community for customers to participate in.

All of these examples are ideal ways for a company to develop trust with customers.

Reaching out, becoming an authority, and proving your knowledge gives you an edge over the competition. When customers benefit from your wealth of knowledge, they will remember you, bookmark you, refer you, and eventually buy your product.

For those of us stuck with the task of writing on such a topic – which often includes the business owner – how can we keep the blog post ideas flowing week after week?

Coming Up With Good Blog Post Ideas

I have been charged with the task of keeping one of these blogs over the last couple of years and have put together a checklist for story ideas which helps me to come up with new ideas on a regular basis:

• Research news relevant to the topic and report it or, more interestingly, critique it and examine it.

• Blog about a famous person or company that has used the product or service you promote. This can make it easier for the post get found in search engines.

• Outline new versus old ways of doing business, which might include how businesses like yours were run before computers, or how companies fared and who they served before cars were invented.

• Write about the history of your field. For example, I write a blog about Time Tracking Software and so I wrote a couple of posts about the history of time keeping ^[2] and time tracking ^[3].

• Compare your topic with another that is totally unrelated. For example, Time Tracking in the Olympics. (No, I didn’t actually write this one!)

• Check Digg, StumbleUpon or Technorati for popular topics and add a new angle to it.

• Promote new clients and write about success stories on your blog.

• Write about a specific underused feature.

• Critique, or even argue, ideas featured by industry leaders.

• Dispel some common myths about your industry.

• Highlight successful characteristics about leaders in your industry.

• Explain how your company solves some common mistakes made in your industry.

There are literally hundreds of blog posts and articles that can come out of just these few ideas.

Surfing the web and staying abreast of trends in and out of your marketplace will help keep the blog post ideas bubbling.

The more you take interest in the market about which you blog, the more passion you will be able to impart on an otherwise boring topic.

Leave your comments below! We’d love to read them.

Peggy Emch has a B.S. in mathematics and a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Colorado. She is currently a blog writer for Timesheets.com ^[4] and The Primal Parent ^[5].

Photo credit: scragz ^[6]