Blog Idea Generation Part 1: Scope and Tone

Recently I've started to get a bunch of comments on these articles from friends. This is fantastic, as every blog author hopes to receive some sort of feedback on their work. However, the comments of late have centered around a theme of "I have no idea how you keep coming up with topics for an apartment blog." Some established bloggers would take this as a sign that they've stayed on one topic too long. Those seeking to establish their professional cred would blather on about how easy it is to generate topic after topic, week after week. Well I'm neither of these things, so here's the upshot: it's tough, it requires consistent effort, and I really have no choice in the matter when it comes to topics given that this is a corporate marketing effort. However. I will take the hint.

For the next month I will set the apartments aside for a four part series on how to create and maintain a longterm single topic blog. Today we'll be focusing on the initial planning process that I went through before I created a single article, back in 2014. We'll then take what I did and expand upon it so that you can hopefully apply it to your own blogs.

I've been blogging about real estate pretty consistently since 2012, first at StrawStickStone and then here at the RentConfident blog. I took a break from it in 2013 but since early 2014 I've published something at least once a week. Between the two sites I've written about 400,000 words, mostly focused on Chicago apartments with some brief tangents into entrepreneurship such as this series. To give you a frame of reference, Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy is about 481,000 words long and the Harry Potter books put together contain about 1.08 million words. I don't consider myself to be an expert on blogging by any stretch of the imagination. But when it comes to creating topics over a long period of time I can provide a few pointers.

Is blogging the best choice for you?

As is the case with most creative endeavors, planning is one of the most important parts of the process. As a blogger you will be planning for every article you write, but you must also plan the meta goals of the blog itself. Here are some questions you should ask first:

• Why am I creating this blog? Usually the purpose of a marketing blog is twofold. You want to establish your expertise in a recurring manner, and you want to create content that you can use to seed your social media advertising campaigns. If you're making a creative blog you will have different goals, maybe to build a portfolio or provide updates on your exciting lifestyle.
• Does my target audience actually want to read long form content? If your market niche consists of people with low education, low literacy, or minimal time to spend on content consumption you might want to opt for a different strategy and skip blogging altogether.
• What software will I use to run the blog online? Will you use an isolated and self-maintained system like WordPress? Will you jump into an existing blog community such as Medium or LinkedIn? Will you roll your own blogging system?
• Who will install said blogging software? Can you do it yourself? Will you have to hire someone to do it? Who will apply bug fixes and patches? Who will design it?
• Who will be doing the writing? Will it be you? Will you hire freelance writers? Will you have employees do it? Will you have guest posts or interviews with outside experts?
• What will your publishing interval be? In our case we started with two authors and published twice a week. Now that we're down to one author we publish once a week. I could probably publish more often than that, and in fact StrawStickStone ran three times a week. But in doing so my entire life became centered around blogging and I do like to do other things now and then. Remember that blog authorship is not just writing an essay. You have to think about graphics, outlinks, SEO keywords, language difficulty and promotional blurbs for each social media outlet. If you don't feel like you can handle this on a regular and pretty frequent basis - no less than every two weeks - find another way to market your business.
• What will your image policy be? Images really help add punch and power to articles. They appeal to the visual learners in your audience and break up the text a bit. Will you get a subscription to a royalty free source like Getty Images? Will you trawl through Google Image search? Will you credit photographers? Will you restrict yourself to only Creative Commons or Public Domain images? Will you draw them yourself?
• How will you interact with your audience? Blogging is inherently interactive. You can, of course, turn off comments, but if you're writing in a vacuum with the expectation of zero feedback you might as well just save your work on your computer and forego the blogging. Expect and invite comments. Plan where those comments should go. Will it be your Facebook page? The blog itself? A third party comment system like Disqus? Also worth considering: how will you deal with nasty comments? What will your threshold be for deleting them, filtering them, replying to them?

Determining Scope

Beyond these questions, you need to decide on the scope of your blog. For corporate bloggers out there, this is the one time you need to think in the direction opposite of everything your advisors have told you. Most entrepreneurs focus on what makes their product, service or company unique and compelling to an audience. It's very precise work. That's fantastic and it's great for determining your target audience. However when it comes to content generation you want to go as broad as you possibly can, while still maintaining plausible connections to your industry. Doing so will open up entire clusters of topics that you might not otherwise consider, but it will also allow you to demonstrate how your business is relevant to customers' individual lifestyles.

There is a game that some play with Wikipedia called "get to philosophy". You start with a random Wikipedia page and, by clicking the first link on each page, see how quickly you can get to their entry on "Philosophy". Usually it only takes a few hops. Similarly, when scoping your blog, you want something that you can "hop" back to from a wide range of subjects with ease. Subjects that affect most of humanity are the best options - eating, drinking, health, transportation, mating, personal image. I have made the joke before that I use apartments as a coat rack off of which I hang my personal opinions, because so many topics - race, poverty, law, corruption, trust, statistics, transportation, gender, engineering, crime, human interaction, aging, dating, childcare, pets - can be addressed through the lens of temporary housing.

In the case of RentConfident, our initial premise is that bad landlords can really mess up your life, so you should screen them before you move. This is a very narrow topic. At first I expanded it to include anything related to apartments or renting. But, one particular bad experience from the StrawStickStone days involving steam radiators showed me the risks inherent in talking about subjects that I don't know pretty thoroughly. So I narrowed it back down to Chicago apartments, eliminating most of the world's geography but also eliminating the risk of getting my laws wrong.

Suppose you are creating a blog for a company that sells handbags. Focusing just on handbags will limit you drastically. Expanding that all the way to its limit you're dealing with either personal image or convenience. If you go the personal image route you can then bring in articles about how to take a selfie that features your handbag, whether or not you should change your handbag after losing a bunch of weight, or even how to dress to keep salespersons off your back while shopping for handbags. If you go the convenience route, potential articles could include how to best arrange a handbag to hold supplies for your new baby, or how to choose a bag that will protect you from pickpockets.

Even blogs that may seem like obvious content wellsprings can afford to broaden their scope a little. A recipe blog, for example, will of course be publishing new recipes on a regular basis and their audience will come to expect recipes. But they could also write about how to responsibly or frugally source ingredients, or provide tutorials on basic cooking techniques, without deviating so far from the expected scope that they lose their audience.

You can, of course, have secondary scopes. This blog has a secondary scope of small business ownership. I prefer to have a secondary scope that allows individual authors to showcase their personality. This helps to build regular readership by humanizing your authors and showing that you value the individuality of your employees. It also allows you to get a little break from focusing on the same topic week after week. Eventually your blog will end and you won't have to write about your main topic anymore. It will be the secondary scope articles that you can take with you to showcase your work to future employers. If you choose to have a secondary scope, I recommend having only one and keeping its appearance in your content stream to a minimum. I usually do a small biz article about once every 4-6 months. At the start of a blog I do not recommend having more than one primary and one secondary scope, with a planned balance of 95% primary and 5% secondary.

Setting the Tone

It's worth considering the tone as well. When I wrote for StrawStickStone, I was a Realtor trying to attract clients. Showcasing my own personality was critical, and as such the articles had a very silly and lightweight tone with a lot of comedy. I deliberately dropped that approach when I switched over to RentConfident as my own personality was no longer part of the sales package. As a service company dealing with government data and legal issues it's important that our articles be relatively straightforward with a corporate tone.

If you're trying to promote a new line of microbrewed beer, you will probably want to find a scope that will be of interest to beer drinkers. Extremely corporate language will be off-putting. You might take a geeky approach focusing on the chemistry and process of making beer. You could take a "bro" approach and create a blog that would fit very nicely in the pages of Maxim magazine. No matter which way you decide to go, make sure your tone informs your choice of scope. Don't plan to focus on the volatile prices of barley and hops in Eastern Europe or the pernicious infestation of cereal leaf beetles unless you're sure you can do it without dropping tone.

Returning again to the example of the handbag blog, your audience will probably be mostly young women and possibly some fashion designers. You will want to avoid taking an overly chauvinistic tone, focusing too much on US-specific cultural indicators, or doing anything blatantly homophobic. If you want baby boomers to buy your handbags you'll want to add a little "hard sell" salesmanship to your tone. If you want Gen X folks to buy your handbags you'll want to talk about anything and everything totally unrelated to handbags and throw in a touch of cynicism. If you want to sell to millennials you'll want to be discussing your own personal experiences with handbag shopping and asking which ones they like the best from your collection.

Try it Yourself!

With these guidelines in mind, let's try a little exercise in the comments for the week. Suppose you are tasked with creating a blog for a company that sells either (a) a series of video games, (b) a new type of travel mug, or (c) marketing services for dentists. Let me know what sort of scope and tone you would choose for one of those topics in the comments! There are no right answers, but some are better than others.

Next week we'll continue the series looking at how to come up with topic ideas within your established project scope.