technorati – Deb Hemley | Multimedia Artist

Article first published as How to Find Ideas for Your Blog Posts on Technorati.
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Writers of all genres talk about periods of being blocked, when ideas don’t come easily and the writing has stopped flowing. It shouldn’t be any surprise then that bloggers would experience times like that, too. Sometimes writers may need to find the right prompt or idea to get them moving again.

While I find many ideas for posts online after reading some of my favorite resources, I still have days when I’m doing more absorbing than writing. A few of those are okay but what happens when it starts to stretch on and you find that you haven’t updated your blog in over a week or more? That’s when I usually find a visit to a bookstore or the library as a cure for wayward writing. For me, I find inspiration when I’m surrounded by thousands of books.

Yesterday you could say I hit a gold mine when I stumbled upon the book, 100 Ways to find Ideas for Your Blog Posts by Steven Aitchinson. (By the way, the list of 100 ideas is also available online but is superb in a bound printed format!) I already do a good number of things mentioned in the book but there were many I hadn’t thought of before.

Here are five of my favorite new ideas for finding inspiration for blog posts:

1. Google Wonder Wheel. This one is just plain fun. The tool is wonderful for people who like to see things visually represented.

Here’s how Steven explains it: “The Google Wonder Wheel is an amazing tool which can spin ideas out of nothing. You can find the Wonder Wheel on the search at google.com, when you search on something there is a + box with ‘Show Options’ on it, you will find the Wonder Wheel on the list on the left hand side. Type in a phrase of your subject and Google Wheel will come up with similar phrases about your subject.”

UPDATE: Since this post was published, wonder wheel has since been discontinued.

Continue reading “How to Find Ideas for Your Blog Posts”

Article first published as Keeping Business Audiences Engaged with Social Media on Technorati.

In the past several years, we’ve seen businesses adopt social media into their marketing and customer support practices. And naturally, there are still laggards. There always will be. But what about the businesses who have created presences? Now what?

Maybe customers and online visitors heeded your social media call. Maybe you can even say that your analytics are up. Perhaps, the quality of the visits demonstrate more engagement than six months ago. But now the question we must ask ourselves is– if we built our social media presences, will they keep coming?

Maria Ogneva’s post, How to: Better Serve the Social Media Customer takes a look at how each department can “blend traditional social media to drive business goals and collaborate on a seamless customer experience.” Maria demonstrates how businesses need systems and “a flow for easy and consistent information dissemination.”

Content is key as it moves across an organization and as Maria points out businesses need to have many touchpoints with their customers, of which social media is one.

For businesses who have climbed over the social media hump, I think Maria has the right ideas when she suggests: 1) Don’t forget about the corporate website, 2) Remember thought leadership and content creation (blogging, guest-blogging, webinars, whitepapers, e-books, presentations, and videos), 3) Participate in online and offline events, 4) Monitor your social media activity for engagement, 5) Build relationships with partners, resellers, and blogger outreach.

Which customer touchpoints have proven to be most effective for your business?

Image credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com ‘s photostream