Writing interesting, compelling content for blog posts is very simple.  Just a dash of brainpower is necessary in order to set yourself up for success.

Besides planning to write on a schedule with consistency, where how can you find writing inspiration?

1) Keep a pad of paper that serves as a brain dump for ideas

2) Think about your ideas in a story arc—with a beginning, a middle and an end.  Blog posts don’t need to be long -- 250 words can do the job.  In fact, there is a whole niche on the internet around Micro Fiction—short stories less than 400 words.  An idea, with context, with a beginning, middle and an end.  

3) Use day to day interactions with customers and situations that come up – even business fires and fire drills can turn into a blog post if you apply a bit of humanity and wisdom to the situation while tying it into your business.  Plus, the funny anecdotes that come out of customer service situations, along as the innocent are protected, serve as excellent educational items

4) Think about translating a prevailing concept and tying into a post related to your business.

One way I like to do #4 this is to read business book summaries.

Everybody loves a good business book—the one with some insight that taps that far away repository in your brain matter that then sends a synapse firing against your memory bank of experiences that creates a new idea.  Books help to feed that fire and add to our repository.

But, let’s be honest, reading books takes time, and most of us have, at best, an hour a day for leisure reading—which makes getting through a book, or several books to spark an idea something of a bit of work, and that presumes that we’re choosing non-fiction books and not a bit of escapist fiction.

There are numerous services that offer, for a reasonable fee, business book distillation summaries—a Cliffs Note version of the book—the essential truths and ideas without all of the interminable anecdotes that fill up 225 pages of a 250 page tome. Clearly, this sort of option lets you glean the ideas, quickly, retaining the good stuff and not engaging in the non-productive activity.  Most summaries are eight pages or less and that’s a program I can get behind.

So, how can you immediately apply this to your blogging?  Simple.  Google “Business Book Summaries” sign up for a sample for a service, read a book summary, glean the ideas and apply it to your business in a way that is accessible to a customer or a potential customer.

For example, for a book like “Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell, I might use that as a frame of reference to discuss the influencers and your core customers that act as your evangelists and how they spread the word for your company.  Every company has these customers and it is just a matter of setting the appropriate context with humanity and authority to apply the concept to your business.  

Easy peasy.  

So, next time you get stumped, just remember that tangential thinking, or allowing different ideas to bounce off each other can be a great way to create an interesting post and business book summaries are one of hundreds of ways to do so.