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Do you remember the term link bait or link baiting? While 2006 and 2007 link baiting was all the rage in recent years it seems people don’t talk or write much about this practice anymore. Has link baiting vanished? Not at all.

Link baiting is daily business right now, it’s the norm.

Indeed I would go as far as to state that link baiting is currently the most important link building tactic or strategy (depends on the bait really). Continue Reading »

Business blogging is not always easy.

A business blog is subjective but unlike a private blog you still are writing for people interested in your trade, products and services and not necessarily you as a person watching movies and eating out.

You can’t annoy people too much, you can’t be too

• personal
• funny
• outspoken

So you need ideas that are creative while not being too creative as to scare away your business audience.

To assist you I collected a list of 50 blog post ideas for business blogging for any industry. You can apply it in most niches I think. Some of these ideas are the bomb and will bring you publicity and popularity while others focus on highlighting your expertise or are part of a social networking strategy. Some of the post ideas are all of these at once.

1. Envision the future of your industry by extrapolating the current developments
2. Explain why everybody should care for your trade and not only specialists
3. Make a list of famous people who deal or dealt with issues related to your business
4. List 30 or more online resources for business people in your industry
5. Review a publication dealing with your industry
6. Make a list of the top myths in your industry and debunk them
7. Disagree with a high level personality in your business, prove her or him wrong
8. Make a list of the top 10 blogs in your niche
9. Report from a trade fair
10. Compare the your national market to markets abroad
11. Collect the best blog postings in your niche and compile a best of-list
12. Expand your focus to a similar area of expertise by comparing
13. Write down a code of ethics for your blog and your business as a whole
14. Explore and depict a niche social media platform for your trade, if there is none use a forum to do that
15. Add a forum to your blog or site if your site has a big enough community to sustain it
16. Break the rules of your trade by remodeling them and adapting to current situation, write about it
17. Go off topic and link a topic from everyday life back to your business “10 Ways SEO is like Base-Jumping”
18. Make a list of WordPress plugins that are most useful for your industry “The 10 Best WordPress plugins for Graphic Designers”
19. Reach out to your clients and fans: “What would you like to change in [insert your product or service here]?”
20. Display attractive images of your products, several of them, in the best case your own products
21. Analyze the current climate in your industry and explain the ramifications
22. Identify leaders in your area and ask them to guest post on your blog or write for their blog instead
23. Show what went wrong in your company, why and how you dealt with it, learning from mistakes is very helpful for others
24. Compare the new vs the old ways of doing your buisness
25. Highlight top female bloggers or experts in your trade
26. Create fictional and visionary product description
27. Satirize a very well known personality, be it of your trade or outside of it
28. Write an allegory about your idol doing your business like “The Bruce Lee Method of Business Blogging”
29. Thank your 10 favorite readers and/or commenters
30. Expose a scam in your industry (make sure to consult a lawyer in advance)
31. Take a big brand (or several) and use it as an example for best practices vs mistakes
32. Use humor to lighten up a boring topic “I Can Haz Pay Per Cat? The Lolcats Way of PPC”
33. Explain the local advantages of your company, do not hide behind modesty: “Oxford: SEO since 1542″
34. Review a book dealing with your topic that really displays thinking outside the box
35. Combine your topic with another one, usually but wrongfully not combined with yours, like SEO and graphic design
36. Express your own personal view an a highly debatable issue and do not just repeat common ground opinions
37. Make a short movie to show on your blog, this can be something funny or just simply you speaking
38. Create a list of indispensable software or web tools for your job
39. Take a common issue many people care about and explain how it relates to your business
40. Introduce a new business model in your trade or better, several of them
41. Be the first to break news, for instance reveal your new product via the blog
42. Check your search engine referers and write postings for those queries that had no matches until now
43. Check in your stats which post is the most popular one and write a follow up
44. Join a trade organization and explain why you did it
45. Make a donation to a good cause and blog about it
46. Introduce the 10 most promising bloggers in your industry
47. Check Digg, StumbleUpon or Technorati to find out what’s most popular right now and find a new angle to it
48. Engage in a discussion on a forum and reprint on your blog
49. Ask people on Twitter a question and blog the best replies
50. Make a list of blogging ideas specifically for your industry

Remember that business blogging is about value. That’s indeed the most crucial difference between private and business blogs. In private blogs people want to express themselves, business bloggers want to create value for others. So while writing a post for a business blog always consider this question: Of what use can this article be to potential clients, people in my industry and the general public?”