What to Blog About Anyway?

Many marketers would agree blogging is a great way to build your web presence and drive traffic to your website. From 2009 to 2011, we did it off and on, but in 2012 we’ve made a consistent push to grow our presence and it is working. We publish a blog weekly, usually on Thursdays, and we add some fun bits on Mondays most weeks. The results, if you Google “construction websites” and “construction brand marketing” we generally come up #1. Why, because that is what we talk about most of the time.

So, who cares that your website traffic increases? I do because I run The Brand Constructors and one of my main roles is business development. Growing the Brand Constructors outside of New Orleans is a goal of ours and we’ve done that through our online presence using this blog, Twitter, and LinkedIn along with face-to-face networking and presentations for trade associations. This has lead to numerous inquiries from construction companies across the United States and Canada, including a surprising large number from Florida. These calls have translated to business without us having to “knock on doors”.

You’re probably thinking, I get blogs are a great business development tool, but what do I blog about anyway?

You want to blog about what you know and talk to your clients. If you look through the past year of our blog posts, all of them are geared toward our clients and prospects issues, questions they commonly ask us, and things the industry needs to know about to succeed. Here are two great ways we’ve used to generate ideas:

1) Brainstorm – Get the team involved and have a 1 hour meeting to generate as many blog topics as possible. Categorize them and make a list. For our parent company’s blog, Design the Planet, the team all blogs monthly and we have a list of suggested topics in Google Docs if they’re stumped on what to talk about this time.

2) Themes – Last year, I created four themes for our blog and covered one each quarter. I then broke them out into monthly themes such as “Thanks” in November and “Proposals” in July. From there, I listed 4-5 blog topics based on the theme and charted them out for the entire year. You can make changes throughout the year if you come up with new ideas or things change in the industry that you want to discuss, but creating that schedule helps you stay consistent with your blog because the first reason why people don’t write blog posts is they don’t know what to talk about in the first place. For example, this week I was supposed to talk about “Holiday Marketing for B-to-B”, but I thought this topic was appropriate as many people are creating their marketing plans for 2013.