Blogs are a powerful tool to have on your website’s arsenal. They aren’t there just to repeat the same story in different words. People look to blogs for how-to’s, opinion, other users experiences and insight to certain products and services. They are also a great way to increase your visibility, but there is little point if they are not useful and full of relevant and sharable content.

To many, the idea of business blogging is groan inducing. It’s extra work at the end of your already very busy day, but blogging tends to be pretty easy once you get going. You can write more casually, reflect your voice and your brand, and even add a little humor. There is just one hurdle that you have to overcome: what the heck you want to write about. Everyone has heard to writers block, and almost everyone has experienced it. But it is not the end, it isn’t even that difficult to overcome. Here are some great ways to beat that block and generate ideas.

The Cause – Fight Blogging Block from the Source
Writers block can come from a wide variety of things. If you are stressed, your brain is going a mile a minute. Your thoughts are zooming by so fast that you don’t even have time to process them, let alone sit down and write a riveting blog post. Take a breath, sit back, get some coffee or tea, stretch, and then sit back down. That blank page might not look so frustrating after that.
Another cause, which might be adding to your stress, is focusing on the wrong things. ‘This blog needs to be (x) number of words’ or ‘This blog needs to be the best blog posts to ever be blogged’. If you’re worried about the technical things, you aren’t focusing on creating prime content for your site. Once more, just breathe, and think about the message you want to get across instead of how many words it has to be or how impressive it must be. A blog post will be appreciated if it has good content.

Content Content Content – Generating Ideas for Business Blogging
Maybe I’m putting the cart before the horse here. Maybe you are sitting back, staring at that blank page because you are completely as a loss for ideas. There is no shame in that. There are a million things you could blog about, it’s hard to even think about a single one sometimes. You are at a disadvantage over other bloggers as well – your blog has to be relevant to the rest of your site, your brand, your services, or all of the above. You can’t just write about your day, or something you saw on your way to work.
Or can you?

Think about your day. Did you see something on the news this morning that you thought was interesting and had something to do with your industry? Blog about it, and tie it back to you and your company. Viola! Blog post.

Inspiration can come from anywhere, but an often untapped resource is your customers. The best way to figure out blog ideas is to ask some simple questions. What are your customers interested in? Send out surveys, visit Q/A sites like Yahoo and Quora, and tap into niche sites like LinkedIn Answers and Focus Q & A. This will help you create a blog post that people will find value in, and also help you figure out keywords to use because you’ll know what people are searching for.

Business blogging does not have to be hard. When you get writers block when blogging, don’t stress out. The ideas will come. You know your company the best, you know your customers and what they want. Use that knowledge to your advantage and don’t let business blogging be a burden to you anymore.