Blogging Off Piste

September 15^th 2015 Sally Ormond blog ideas, blogging, blogging for business

Fountain of knowledge

My advice, when it comes to blogging for your business, is to stick with what you know.

It’s your keen insight into your industry and advice that people want. They want to learn from your fountain of knowledge to develop their own skills.

The problem is what do you do when your fountain dries up?

Admittedly, your knowledge will be so deep it will probably be a long time before that happens. You can revisit articles and update them, or perhaps come up with different viewpoints for things.

However, sooner or later you’ll suffer from writer’s block.

You’ll struggle to come up with something new, or a new angle.

Your fingers will hover above your keyboard as you stare helplessly at the blank screen, willing something, anything to appear.

When that happens it’s time to try something different.

Dare to go off piste

Now, when I say ‘go off piste’ I don’t mean so far off it you end up floundering at the bottom of a crevasse somewhere.

Your blog will have a core focus – your industry.

Your industry will have many different facets, so take a look at those and see which ones you haven’t written about much.

Take mine as an example.

As a copywriter, I write about anything and everything to do with creating content. Mind you, once you’ve gone through email marketing, newsletters, website copy, brochures etc., what’s left?

Granted, I could write about those all day because there are so many different angles to come at, but now and then I like to shake things up a bit.

Copywriting is part of the behemoth that is marketing.

By widening my writing sphere to encompass marketing, I have a whole host of pistes that I can tackle to bring in new ideas.

I can branch out into search engine optimisation and search marketing, Google Adwords, website design, tone of voice, language…the list is endless.

You see, if you stay too blinkered and just look at the specific area of your industry, you’ll run out of things to say. If you widen your scope you’ll have an endless supply of information.

It will also have the added benefit of widening your knowledge.

Writing about something that’s less familiar to you will mean you have to do some research and it’s that reading around that will build on what you already know and may even give you some fresh ideas you can use in your business.

Will my readers like it?

If you stick within your industry but write about a new area, your readers will probably gain a lot from it and you may even draw in a wider readership.

However, if you go so far off piste that the link to your industry is rather tenuous, you might alienate a few people.

It’s impossible to know how a topic will go down without a crystal ball so my best advice is to try it and find out.

Your analytics will show you how well received your blog was. If it falls flat, avoid that subject; if it thrives, you now have a whole new fountain of knowledge to write about.

My advice is to use your wider knowledge to blog about related topics, not just your core industry. Not only will you enrich the experience for your existing audience, you will also draw in a whole new crowd.