(As in past years, I will only be posting once a week in July and August.)

Many bloggers suggest seeking inspiration for post ideas in the posts on other people’s blogs.  This, of course, is just an extension of doing the same from articles and books.  They are what Greg Knauss calls referential bloggers.  As Kevin O’Keefe points out referential blogging also increases the visibility and influence of your blog.

Referential blogging is easier if you remember to write with PRIDE, an acronym which stands for Promote, Rant, Interpret, Disagree and Elaborate.

1.    Promote

You can promote someone else’s idea, post or blog by citing and endorsing it.  Ian Brodie’s Rainmaker Resources blog does that for blogs addressing the subject of selling professional services.  Individual posts highlight a specific blog and its author.  A different approach to promoting other people’s posts is the blog carnival, exemplified by the highly successful blog Carnival of Trust started by Charlie Green, which highlights ten posts a month dealing with trust.  I know from first-hand experience how having a post chosen for this carnival can create a spike in readership. (Thank you, Charlie.)  The Hidden Business Treasure’s post, proclaiming Charlie’s Trust Matters blog as the Blog of the Year, is yet another example of promoting on a blog.

2.     Rant

Someone else’s post can set you off on a rant, as one of Margaret Grisdela’s did me, resulting in the post Many Reasons Not to Call vs. One Reason to Call.  I enjoy reading a short, well written rant.  I like the author’s passion, conviction and seeming abandonment prudence.  A good one makes me cheer, or, better, laugh.  And writing a rant helps you get something off your chest.  It feels great to just let it all go!  The relief one feels after pushing the publish button on your host page is palpable.  And, well . . . don’t get me started.

3.    Interpret

You can interpret someone else’s post, book or article for your audience.  Liz Strauss does this in her post, Can Social Media Change the World, applying concepts from a favorite book on inovation to her field.

4.    Disagree

Reading controversy is often more fun than reading agreement and disagreement, can be fun to write.  Sims Wyeth and I had an exchange over the use of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) and GOG (greed, opportunity and glory) in selling (see FUD or GOG and More Debate over FUD and GOG), Suzanne Lowe and I had one over the role of a Chief Marketing Officer in a professional services firm (see What Does a CMO Do?)  Alan Weiss and I locked horns over the value of LinkedIn.  I found these exchanges challenging, and they resulted in a spike in readership for all parties.  If you are worried about the other person taking offense at your disagreement, call and explain what you want to do.  Chances are he or she will welcome the exchange.

5.    Elaborate

You can elaborate on a point found on someone else’s blog.  Mark Buckshon does this well in a recent post that builds off of a Mel Lester post.

Keeping PRIDE in mind will help you generate ideas for posts when reading other people’s blogs, articles and books.

How would you respond to this question that a friend recently asked me?

Ford,

A.

In an earlier post, I promised a series on generating ideas for blog posts.  For my second post on this subject, go to Daily Blog Tips, where it first appeared.

Reading Liz Strauss’s Successful & Outstanding Bloggers, a great resource for bloggers, I was directed to Sonia Simone’s post on SlowBlogging which, as is the way with blogs, led me to Mara Rogers’s post on SpeedBlogging. Both of these pieces address, in part, the challenge of coming up with ideas for posts week after week. This is an issue for all steady bloggers, so I have put together my thoughts on the subject, which I will publish in three posts over the next few months.

For starters, here are ten ways to maintain a steady flow of ideas for posts

1. Keep a List

Both Simone and Rogers make this point and I only repeat it because it is essential. Ideas for posts don’t necessarily come to you when you have time to write; they come in reaction to some stimulus during your day. If you don’t write them down when they come to you, you will forget half of them. When you do sit down to write, you can pick a subject from your list that fits your need and mood. My list now runs to five pages with two thirds of the ideas used up and crossed off. About half the remaining entries don’t look like such good ideas any more, so I’m due for a list extension session.

2. Listen to Your Clients

Business bloggers write to reach their clients and so seek to write things of interest to that audience. Logically, this means your clients are the best source of information on what to write about. They are. The majority of ideas for my posts come from clients. I try to get at least one idea from each client meeting. Clients’ questions, doubts, observations, opinions, stories, boasts and complaints all provide potential grist for a post. But you have to be listening.

3. Listen to Your Readers

You also write for your readers, clients or not. Look at comments as sources of ideas. This is just one reason for establishing a dialogue with your readers. An increasing number of the Rainmaking Problem posts come from this source. They come buried in the comments to the Rainmaking Problem posts, and now there is also a noticeable flow of questions coming by email, the author’s offering the use of their question as a subject for a post. I believe that if I didn’t listen to my readers and encourage them, both the comments and the questions would dry up.

4. Reflect

Spend twenty minutes with your list in front of you thinking of ideas. For some reason ideas seem to come to me in spurts. I will have five or six ideas in quick succession and then none for several days. I doubt I am unique in this. When ideas start to flow, take ten minutes and see how many you can come up with.

5. Organize Your Thinking

Anything you do to organize your thoughts tends to throw off ideas for posts. It can be an outline, typology, mind map, ranking or some other organizing vehicle. The organization, itself, may be bloggable and so may be individual elements. So whenever you engage in thought organizing, recognize that post ideas will be a byproduct. I am currently preparing a new training program which has generated several good ideas.

6. Look for Gaps

Any point in your conversations or writing that you tend to brush over for lack of a clear understanding is worth at least considering as a subject for a post. Writing about it will force you to clarify your own thinking, a major benefit of blogging. Listen for conversational ellipses, such as … and that eventually lead to (exactly how?) … or … as an outgrowth of (again, how?) … or … surprisingly (then, why does it happen?)…. This amounts to listening for the dog that doesn’t bark and takes some practice, but can be remarkably productive, once you get the knack of it.

7. Jot Notes as You Write

Writing, itself, tends to stimulate your thinking. As you write posts, emails and reports, jot down the ideas that come to you. Edit out a paragraph, because it doesn’t quite fit? Ask yourself if it might work as a post. Have one more example of an idea than you need? Maybe it’s the start of a post. Ask yourself if an email might have a second life as a post, if you rewrite it for a broader audience.

8. Drill Down or Step Back

Going into detail on a point you make briefly in a broader argument can generate a post. Who’s in Your Audience? drills down on how to learn who is in your audience when you present at a conference. Alternatively, you can take a small idea and place it in a larger context. The post, What Does It Mean to Prepare for a Sales Meeting, shows that what many professionals do to prepare doesn’t make sense, if you step back and put it in the context of how clients decide whom to hire.

9. Note the Little Points

Most professionals have little points that they make to their clients repeatedly. Little points are perfect for posts, because they lend themselves to brevity. For years I have advised clients that there are no extra points for doing business development the hard way. That simple but overlooked truth became the title for a popular post.

10. Build on a Theme

An idea for one post may contain a theme for several. No extra points became a theme for two more posts (No Extra Points for Originality a and No Extra Points for Doing Business Development an Unpleasant Way). Another theme that has sprung from a single post is A Lesson From (Maurie, Dick, Edwin, Charlie and Joe), a series which captures lessons I have learned from others over the years. Readers like themes, which provide continuity among posts as a balance to variety.

Future posts on the Keep Them Coming: Ideas for Blog Posts theme will appear roughly one and two months from today and will address:

• How to develop posts from those you read on other people’s blogs and
• Using formulas to generate posts

Steve Shu, who gave up blogging for a year, is back at it.  He explains why in an interesting post.

Steve, you didn’t mention that it is also addicting.

In responding to my recent post, Rainmaking Problem #2: The Next Level of Blogging, Mel Lester raised several questions that reminded me of how I felt in my early blogging days.  (He wasn’t really singing the blues, but I liked the way the title sounded, so I kept it.)  I will give my answers to his questions.  If you disagree or have something to add, please comment below.

Who reads the blogs, especially new ones?  Are they mostly other bloggers, as the comments to early posts seem to suggest?

I don’t know for sure.  I believe that early audiences are made up primarily of people you have notified of the blog and other bloggers.  Bloggers are more interested in blogging and other blogs than are most people, so they are more likely than non-bloggers to come across yours.  Capturing a few of these as regular readers helps grow the blog because they are likely to mention your blog in theirs and to link to it.  This brings in more readers.  Early on, you should be targeting other bloggers for this reason.  More acuratelly, you should always be targeting other bloggers for this reason.  So, for example, you can comment on other blogs on yours with trackbacks to them.

Do buyers of your services read blogs?

Probably not, especially in its early months.  This is even more likely to be true, if your buyers are extremely busy people.  The older they are, the less likely they are to read blogs.

In that case, is blogging an effective means of connecting with them?

Like other marketing tools and techniques, blogging is most effective if integrated into a larger marketing effort.  Your buyers are more likely to see your blog, if you send them an email with a link to a post of interest to them.  If you can get your posts published in on-line newsletters, more people see them and some will be attracted to them.  Assigning posts as required reading in your training programs also reinforces your blog’s importance and its availability as a resource.  Through these techniques, readership grows little by little.  Good content speeds up the process.

Bloggers I talk to cite the value of blogs in making it easy for prospective clients to find their firm when using search engines.  (See The News from India: Blogging to Sell Professional Services and More News from Down Under: How Shawn Callaghan Blogs for Fun & Profit )When I search on Google for “management of AE firms,” for example, the first page includes references to Zweig White, PSMJ, Sullivan Keiss and others.  Your firm is found at the bottom of Page 3, in listing number 40, which isn’t bad.  If I do a blog search, it comes up on Page 1, listing number three, which is great.

None of this demonstrates the superiority of blogging over other routes to market.  Whether your time is better spent on it or some other activity, I don’t know and wonder, myself.

(This is part of my series on Rainmaking Problems. I hope you will leave a comment with your thoughts on a solution to this problem.)

Today I place my own problem before you.  As a person who puts himself forward as knowing something about selling professional services, I have tried to keep abreast of changes in marketing techniques.  I do so by interviewing people who have used a technique, but also by using it myself.  I’m able to talk about how to write an article, because I have written over 100.  I’m able to talk about networking, because I have a large network that feeds me business opportunities year after year.

The Internet is changing the way that professionals market and sell their services.  One of my efforts to keep abreast of these changes was starting this blog.  Having published it for about a year and a half, I feel justified in making some comments about how blogging works.  I may not be an expert, but at least I have a grasp of what I know and of how much I don’t know.

In the first category is my knowledge and that if this blog is to be truly successful I must take it to the next level.  I know what this level looks like, but I don’t how to get there.  Having looked at a good many blogs by now, I believe that successful ones move from the driving force of content to that of community and that this is done through comments.  Let me explain.

The day you start a blog, you have no readers.  You may be able to attract readers once with an advertisement or a mass e-mailing, but to keep them coming back requires content.  And supplying that content can be deliciously fun at first.  I look back on writing some of my early posts, such as He Talks Too Much and Three Ways to Get a Good Seat, with pleasure.  In this way you build your first readership base.  I will call this Level 1.  Business blogs without solid content fade quickly.

While building to Level 1, your posts receive few comments.  A low percentage of those who read blogs ever comment—the figure one percent is commonly thrown about.  You simply don’t have enough readers to spark much comment, let alone dialogues.

But many people surf the net not just to receive information, but to exchange it.  If you want to grow your base of readers to the next level, you must engage them in a dialog.  That is, you must write in such a way to attract comments; not just any comments, but the kind that attracts still others.  If you do this assiduously, those looking to participate in a dialog, plus those interested in reading debate in addition to content will form a community of readers, which I will call Level 2.  It is much larger than achieved at Level 1.  The community comes to your site to read and to be read, to agree and to disagree, and to feel.  They come to feel smart or funny or provocative, but above all else they come to feel connected.

And that’s where I need help.  I believe I have plateaued at Level 1 and want to move ahead to Level 2.  But I don’t know how to do it.  There’s something wrong with either my writing or my format or something.  Or perhaps I’m just not patient enough.  As bloggers and participants in blogging communities, can you advise me how to move from content to community, through making people want to comment to making them feel connected?

Or am I looking at the problem the wrong way altogether?

(Got a problem selling professional services? Feel free to email me your problem and it may become a future “Rainmaking Problem.”)