I just took 30 minutes and came up with 16 blog topics – some of which will become three or four posts as I begin to write – and they are all things that my target readership feels passionate about.

That’s 3-4 weeks’ worth of hot blog topics for half an hour of work – and it was fun, too.

Blog Topics For Your Niche – Free!

It’s a little sneaky, but I don’t mind admitting it: I eavesdropped.

Generating Ideas Through Social Media Snooping

I used my favorite social network of the moment -Twitter – to find out what my potential readers are craving. And here’s how (it’s so simple that if you’re not already doing this, you’re going to kick yourself).

• Go to Search.twitter.com and typed in a keyword (in this case “writing”).
• Read 3-4 pages of complain-y and celebratory Tweets that contained your keyword.
• Make lightning-fast notes about the teeny sub-topics each Tweet represented, and how you might address them.
• Pop them into a mind-map document and add sub-topics to them as the ideas occurred to you (I use IThoughtsHD on my iPad. You could also use XMind or a simple spreadsheet or bullet list. I recommend Google Docs because you can access them from anywhere you have an internet connection, and you never know when you’ll have a spare half hour to compose a blog post.)
• Whenever your typing slows, go back to the search results page and look for another topic. The point of this exercise is to capture only ideas that interest both your and your readers. If you’re bored so are they. Move on.

Why Snooping Is Better Than Surveying

Sure, I could have sent out a request asking my readers what they wanted to know.

The problem with asking people for their opinions is that they

1. think about it for too long
2. want to impress you because you were nice enough to ask for their opinion or
3. are too busy to answer and  you end up only getting responses from the people who aren’t your real customers.

By snooping on social media, you have access to the raw, knee-jerk, 140-character exclamations of your audience when they are delighted, outraged, pissed off, passionate. In other words, you are finding out what they really care about.

And doesn’t that sound like the perfect launch-point for your next blog post?

Beyond Twitter

If you are writing a business blog, you might be better off searching through Linked In status updates. If you are writing for an industry niche, check out the most active industry forum online (you know the one).

If you’re really stuck, really in a hurry, and don’t need topics targeted specifically to your customers, check out Chris Brogan’s Blog Topics Service: it’s not free but it’s not an outrageous amount to invest in your business, either.

If you exhaust this technique and are ready to be a little overwhelmed, take a look at Copyblogger’s 50 Can’t Fail Tecnhiques for Finding Great Blog Topics.

Keep Up The Good Work

Life moves quickly.

Don’t waste your time coming up with more than a month’s worth of post ideas at a time. For all we know, some kind of seismic shift might occur in two months that will change the way you and your readers look at the world. You’ll want to write about that instead of whatever matters to you today.

Commit to doing this idea-generating exercise once a month.

Store the information somewhere that is easy for you to access (Google Docs, or just email it to yourself)

Throw out old ideas that no longer excite you.

Oh, and write the damned articles and post them every day.

Too many small and local business still don’t have a website. Find out why you need to take control of your online presence (even if you didn’t know you had one!)

Recently, I was building a new Twitter persona for a business and trying to figure out how to gain exposure.

I started by using Twitter’s search function to find people who were tweeting about the same topic. Then I followed as many as I could find. (I’m continuing to add to the list each day.)

Why?

Well, a lot of Tweeple (that’s Twitter People, in case you haven’t heard) like to follow anyone who follows them. Sure, it makes keeping up with tweets hard, but from a business point of view it makes sense: the more people you follow and are followed by, the more chance there is of someone reading your tweets. If you are targeting your followers through keyword searches, then you have found your audience. And — because of the auto-follow etiquette — they have found you.

After monitoring the profile for a while and manually following people who followed me I quickly realized I needed to automate the process and focus my energies on creating great content.

Dave Taylor has posted an excellent tutorial (with screenshots, hoorah!) taught me how to use TweetLater to handle the automation. TweetLater has other useful tools too, but for now I’m using it to

• auto-follow,  and
• send a ‘welcome’ message when people follow the profile, linking back to the business’s website.

I’m scanning tweets and jumping in to conversations, and tweeting whenever the business has some news or a new blog post. I”m also engaging with people who write back to thank me for the welcome message, and many have.

I have started to see increased traffic on the business website with this unobtrusive and, frankly fun form of marketing. It feels collaborative and light-hearted and nothing like “sales”!

This morning my local radio station interviewed some of the people attending and organizing the Bench2Business conference, which is aimed at “aspiring and established scientists and entrepreneurs of color”.

Everyone they interviewed was really positive. No-one wasted time complaining about the inequities of the past or present, but instead talked about creating opportunities and role models.

Even more tellingly, one of the organizers sidestepped the moral issues altogether and pressed on to economics, saying,

You just cannot leave 30% of your society sitting on a side line and think you’re going to drive an economy in this country.
see original article

See? That’s a message people can rally around, because it promises something for everyone. He’s saying, “no matter what your position on race or equality or affirmative action, or politics or economic theory, you will be richer if you espouse my cause.”

If you want to persuade people to agree with you, buy your product, espouse your ideas, let them see what’s in it for them.

…Has an equal and opposite reaction.

It’s true in physics, and OK it’s slightly less true in business but bear with me.

In every downturn there are opportunities for those who are willing to look for them.

Today I noticed a local furniture store that was going out of business after 81 years. It’s sad and awful for the people involved, and you and I could spend a lot of time wallowing in an analysis of the terrible direction the economy is taking.

Or we could think: who can benefit from this?

It seem to me that even in the death of a furniture store there is opportunity.

Opportunity for:

• The owners of a furniture removal company, who can get a couple of trucks down to the store on Saturday morning and offer good deals to people who are scooping up floor samples and trying to balance couches on the back of their pick-up trucks in the rain.
• The owners of a van rental company, who can make quick, short-term rentals from the parking lot.
• A local interior designer who can offer a tip-sheet on how to make the new furniture work, or who can sell a booklet about design matters, or who can hand out coupons for discounts on her services.

What is going on around you and are you flexible enough to make it work for you?

Want to build a huge list of pre-qualified prospects? Take  tip from the President-Elect.

In trying to figure out how Barak Obama won the election, the pundits agree that his organization was great a using new media to keep in touch with and build their base.

So how exactly did they get people to sign up?

One brilliant example came before Obama announced his pick for his running mate. The campaign gave people the chance to be the first to know who he had picked by signing up for text messages or an email — no more waiting around for traditional news outlets to tell them the news. All you had to do was give the campaign a way to contact you and you could get a jump on even the media in-crowd. Who wouldn’t love that?

Of course, this meant you were added to their database, but people didn’t seem to care because, pay attention now, they were getting something they valued in return.

Is there something you can offer your potential clients in exchange for their contact info?

Can you offer them a “buy one, get one 50% off” deal on their first purchase? Can you give them a free, exclusive, special report (or ‘white paper’) when they sign up for your newsletter? Can you give them something that will provide real value for them in exchange for their permission to keep in touch?

Create value, create releationships, create business.