Anyway, here are some of the ones that I tend to use.

Write about current events

Something that you probably do on an ongoing basis is keeping an eye on what is being written about your industry, perhaps through various news media and ideally with the help of RSS feeds which of course saves you a load of time and gets you the news in double quick time. So just choose an event or piece of information which is of interest to you and your readers and give your comments on it and perhaps its implications. Don’t forget to reference the article and the site where appropriate though.

Read other blogs

Keep an eye on other blogs and what they are talking about – you will probably find subjects that you wish to develop further, ones that you wish to comment on in your own blog (don’t forget to use a trackback!) or ones that simply spark new ideas that you can write about. Other blogs are great sources of current thinking and new potential ideas.

Write a Series

Select a topic and write a set of posts around the theme you have selected. Try to plan the series out in advance (at least the titles) and then write them as you need them. Alternatively, once you get into the series, you may find that you write a number of them all at once. That’s great! But don’t get carried away and post them all together, instead postdate them (in Wordpress, just change the “Post Timestamp”) so that they publish automatically a few days apart.

Revisit old posts you have written

Check back over some of your old posts and see if there are ones that could be developed more fully. You may feel that there are now updates or new information that you would like to add to them, so do so in a new post which references back to the original one and develops the ideas further.

Answer Questions from Comments on Posts

Use contacts from people who have asked for information or have asked questions which have developed on your original post and opened up in turn new areas or topics. Take these questions or the points that they raise and develop the answers into new posts.

Get a guest blogger in

You do not need to write all of the posts yourself, many Business Blogs will in fact have two or even more people working on them. However, if you don’t have people who post regularly, you can still have a “guest blogger” who might come in to post on a particular subject where they have a specialist knowledge.

There is of course a final option – simply take a break from posting for a few days. There’s no issue with that – just let your readers know and they’ll be waiting for your return with bated breath.

Related posts:

1. Generating Ideas for your Business Blog posts
2. How to stop comment spam on your Blog
3. Green Cross Code of Business Blogging

For me, there are two main sources of ideas: you and everyone else.

Blog Post Ideas – You

You want to make sure that you capture all the ideas that come to you and personally I use a nice and easy solution for this: I keep a notebook with me at all times. Why? So that I can note down ideas that occur to me during the course of the day – and, believe me, they can come at the weirdest moments. They could be triggered by any event, by something that I see which sparks a connection or by a comment that somebody makes to me. I note down the idea and any associated thoughts that crop up at the time and then I go back, review and use these ideas as and when I need to.

Blog Post Ideas – Everyone Else

When it comes to “everyone else”, the best people to take ideas from are your customers, your prospects and your partners – these are all the sorts of people who are likely to ask those questions which others would benefit from as well, so can be a great source of inspiration.

So, make a note of the main ones and make a point of talking about them on your blog. Treat it in the same way as you would when you take questions from the audience during a presentation – that’s to say, repeat the question that has been asked so that the rest of the audience can hear and then go ahead and answer it.

Do the same in your blog – you will be providing information which will answer relevant and real questions that should help your customers use your product better and help your prospects to understand its potential better.

So that you have this resource developing on an ongoing basis, I suggest that:

• you keep a folder in your email system and make a copy of both the question you receive and the response you send back – this will in itself form the basis of your business blog post;
• after meetings with clients, prospects or suppliers, note down some of the key questions that they asked and which were clearly on interest to them;
• at Conferences and Exhibitions, keep a record of the questions or the areas that visitors to your stand keep asking about and are showing most interest in.

You’ll soon find that you have topics for your posts planned out well in advance and as you write the posts, you will hopefully also start to receive comments which will start to take the discussions and questions in other directions as well.

Related posts:

1. Generating yet more ideas for your Business Blog
2. Great post titles give great reader figures
3. The Blog Coach returns

We will be looking at all aspects of blogging from the planning and design of blogs and blogsites which deliver on their business objectives, through to their marketing and ongoing development. In all cases, the focus will be firmly focused on the business aspect – not in terms of monetising your blog with adverts and the like, but in using a blog to develop business for your company.

The Blog Coach blogsite is designed and aimed at three main groups:

• corporates, small business and solopreneurs which are either planning or merely thinking about setting up a business blog to work for their businesses;
• those companies looking for ways to develop and/or market a blog which they have already set up for their business;
• anyone interested in understanding more about how to use the Social Media Marketing Toolkit they have at their disposal.

While it isn’t specifically aimed at experienced individual bloggers, I hope that The Blog Coach will be able to offer you something as well and I would welcome comments and feedback from you so that it can be shared with others.

In addition to the main categories which will help you identify areas of particular interest, there are also some guiding categories which will help to give focus to the posts. These will be:

• Planning and Setting up a Blog
• Writing and Developing your Blog
• Business Blog Marketing
• Blogging for your Business
• Corporate Blogging
• New Media / Social Media Marketing Toolkit

Although it will be aimed at and looking at the use of blogging in business sense and how to make it work for you, I hope that people running individual blogs will certainly gain from some of the sections.

So, whatever stage you are at with your Business Blogging, I invite you to dip in on a regular basis – to make that as easy as possible, why not add The Blog Coach to your favourite RSS Reader as well? Hopefully you’ll find the areas that we’re going to be discussing useful as well as interesting, and that you’ll feel the urge to join in!

I look forward to hearing from you.

Related posts:

1. The Blog Coach returns
2. The Blog Coach is spotted!
3. The Blog Coach and why hire a Blogging Consultant

Does my blog only show up in Blog Search Engines like Technorati or will it also be found on Google, Yahoo and MSN?

The Blog Coach replies:

When they first start to run a Business Blog and learn about the Blog Search Engines, some people worry that blogs will only appear in these blog specific Search Engines and not in the mainstream ones. This is absolutely not true.

A Blog at the end of the day is a website which has certain special characteristics – therefore, it will certainly appear in the main Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. In fact, blogs are much more likely to rank highly in the main Search Engines because they have some key elements that the Search Engines find very attractive:

• the fact that they are generally updated on a very frequent basis; Search Engines particularly like sites which are regularly updated and the more recent the information, the higher its relevance is likely to be;
• the inbound links from other blogs (and websites) which is part and parcel of the ethos of the blogosphere and which is one of the major factors in ranking sites;
• their internal structure, which is highly organised and groups similar posts together in categories. This creates highly relevant pages on individual topics which Search Engines love;
• the very focused nature and quality of their content which is at the core of what Search Engines are looking to offer their users.

The main Search Engines will find your Blog by following links to it from other sites that are already in their index, so there is no need to submit it directly to them. It will then be ranked using the criteria that are applied to any other site, criteria which will rank you well if you are using a Blog to good effect.

You can use other Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) methods in addition which will give an additional boost in your rankings, but you already have a number of advantages which will serve you well. So make sure that you write quality and targeted posts on a regular basis and ensure that you promote your blog well.

Related posts:

1. Great post titles give great reader figures
2. Using Technorati to research your future Blog or your Market

While I had been intending to keep the launch of “The Blog Coach” quiet until after my break next week to allow me to add some content and additional functionality to it, Easton over at the excellent BusinessBlogWire has as ever been keeping his eyes peeled and ear to the blogging ground. Anyway, the long and the short of it is that The Blog Coach has been spotted.

So why the second site on Blogging?

As you may know I run the Better Business Blogging site which is designed to help give all the information you may need when setting up, developing and marketing a Business Blog. This has been hugely successful in its goal of providing a wide range of information on Business Blogging and nothing will be changing there – in fact, I will be increasing that. (Watch that space, so to speak!)

What I wanted to do was to set up a site which would also support my Blog Consultancy and Blogging Training Workshops here in the UK, and rather than interfere with the Better Business Blogging site, do so through an independent blog. Hence, The Blog Coach was born. I also want to be able to highlight the developments in the take up and understanding of blogging in the UK which I felt would not be appropriate on Better Business Blogging.

Anyway, formal launch comes later in the month and in the meantime … Welcome!! … and please do get in touch with me at mark(at)theblogcoach.co.uk to let me know about your blog or how you would like to use a blog to help develop your business.

Related posts:

1. The Blog Coach returns
2. The Blog Coach: new and improved
3. The Blog Coach and why hire a Blogging Consultant

Question

If I want to run a Blog for my business, what is the best place to host it? Should I use a hosted service or would it be better to host it myself?

The Blog Coach replies:

If you are looking to set up a Blog which you will be using for your Business, then I would always recommend that you would be better to host it yourself, just as you probably already do with your website. The simple reason for this is that it will give you most control over it and flexibility which means that it will best be able to answer your business’ requirements.

I think that the free hosted systems such as Blogger or Wordpress.com (as opposed to Wordpress.org) are great for personal blogs because they are free and because there is very little for you to do except start to write. However, they do come with an inherent risk, as you may decide over time that you want to do more with your blog than can be done with a hosted system like this, at which point it is very difficult to move all of your content across to your new blog. Even making permanent (301) redirects so that people can still find all of your content that has been indexed is not possible on some of these blog systems, which will lead to a lot of frustration and possibly lost leads too. There have even been cases reported where proper Business blogs have been mistaken for spam blogs (splogs) and had their content deleted. Not a good situation!

Making the right choice in terms of your blogging platform is a key early decision and you want to try to consider not only your current requirements but also try to look forward to what you are going to want to do in the future as well. Ideally, something like Wordpress or Movable Type will be able to grow with you.

If you decide to host it yourself, you will need to consider whether to choose a new domain name and run your blog there or whether you should incorporate the blog into your current website. Both options have merit. If it deals with issues which are distinct from those that you talk about on your main website then it may be sensible to select a relevant domain name and separate the two. However, by incorporating the Business Blog alongside your other content (and integrating it graphically into the look and feel of the site) then you can use it as a complementary means of engaging with prospects and customers, and so enhance the positioning of your business through it.

To sum up: overall, primarily for reasons of control, security and future-proofing for your business, we would recommend that you steer away from hosted services for your blog as it is likely to become a key part of your business.

Related posts:

1. Thinking of starting a business blog? Consider this …
2. Finding a Domain name for your Blog
3. Choosing a name for your Blog