What you may have trouble with is what to write about in your blog.

With that in mind, I’ve brainstormed 67 blog ideas to get your creative juices flowing. What you write about in your blog will of course depend on your type of blog, your industry, whether you’re selling products or services, whether you have a local walk-in establishment, and a number of other factors.

When you browse through this list, remember that most blogs should have a wide variety of blog post types rather than always sticking with the same ones. While it’s fine to announce a new product or service on your blog, if that’s all you do, it could get pretty boring.

I’ve put the types of information into a few different categories to make it easier for you to scan for the type that might interest you. So without further ado, I give you 67 ideas for blog topics that could interest your target audience:

Upcoming events:

1. Classes, seminars, conferences, webinars (and why you should attend).
2. Special events (wine tastings, 5-course dinners, open houses, etc.)
3. Introduction to new products or services.
4. Important company announcements (as long as this isn’t all you do).
5. Free stuff you’re giving away.
6. Special offers, discounts, coupons.
7. Gift ideas.

Contests or other promotions:

8. Photo caption contest.
9. Holiday theme contest.
10. Product naming contest.
11. Logo design contest.
12. Send in a video contest.

Tutorials, product support and how-to guides (in the form of text, videos, or infographics):

13. How to set up your products.
14. How to choose your products or services.
15. How to use your products.
16. How to fix your products.
17. How to assemble your products.
18. How to clean your products.
19. How to protect your products.
20. How to know if you need a particular product or service.
21. How to get the most out of your product or service.
22. Explain the subtle differences between your products (and/or those of your competitors).
23. Answer reader and customer questions.
24. Conference session summaries.

Show your expertise:

25. Do it yourself: For example, how to create a Title tag, how to unclog a toilet, how to file your taxes.
26. Provide your thoughts on industry news.
27. Take an opposite stand on an important industry topic.
28. How to avoid making mistakes (in whatever it is you do).
29. Industry myths.
30. Show both sides of an industry debate and provide your opinion.
31. Discuss industry trends.
32. Discuss the results of tests you’ve performed relating to your industry.
33. How to be a better…whatever.
34. How to avoid…whatever.
35. How to protect yourself from…whatever.
36. How to survive a…whatever.
37. How to recover from a…whatever.
38. How to become a…whatever.
39. How to create a…whatever.
40. How to change your…whatever.
41. How to calculate your…whatever.
42. How to beat…whatever.
43. How to improve your…whatever.
44. How to make your…whatever…easier.
45. How to save money on…whatever.
46. How to be seen as…whatever.
47. How to have the…whatever…you always wanted.
48. How to stop doing…whatever.
49. How to justify…whatever.
50. The problems with…whatever.
51. The importance of…whatever.
52. What caused…whatever?
53. How to understanding the subtleties of…whatever.
54. What not to do with…whatever.

Interviews (in the form of writing, videos, audio, or a combination):

55. Interviews with industry experts.
56. Interviews with people who work at your company.
57. Interviews with people who’ve used your products or services.

Miscellaneous:

58. Best posts of the year.
59. Breaking industry news.
60. Industry predictions for the future.
61. Provide an analogy between what you do and something in life that people can relate to.
62. Satirize your industry or products (could be via a comic):
63. Reader polls and the results.
64. Industry awards.
65. Product and service reviews and recommendations.
66. Quizzes or tests.
67. Expose bad things that are happening in your industry.

Iconic US corporations Ford Motors, Abbot Laboratories, Kraft Foods, Nike or even Wall Street Banker Goldman Sachs would have a lower valuation than Facebook after its IPO. Last  week the world’s largest commodity trader Glencore and the 4th largest global mining group Xstrata started talks for an $80 billion merger.

The merger valuation will make the two Swiss based commodity and mining  giants with physical presence in over 60 nations bring together assets of over $100 billion worth of coal, oil, wheat, cotton, nickle, copper, that the two companies have accumulated over the last 5 decades.

The assets against liabilities seem fairly balanced and moderately priced in the case of Glencore-Xstrata merger as they seem in any other global company.   Not so in the case of social media upstart Facebook whose share hype at its proposed IPO will give it a possible valuation of $100 billion, much higher than many of the Forbes Fortune 100 companies some of whom have been in business for over a century .

Given the strong credentials of the Wall Street Bankers falling over each other to underwrite this issue it is quite possible that Facebook IPO pulls off this massive fraud on gullible investors. After all lead under-writer’s Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase and Bank of America had pulled off the massive US housing mortgage over-valuation scam worth over a trillion dollars for nearly two decades before the 2008 collapse which destroyed Lehman Brothers and caused the global banking industry melt down.

Unlike the US housing mortgage scam, Facebook’s $100 billion valuation can be controlled easily because only a small amount of the promoter’s holdings are being diluted and the net exposure for the global banks will not exceed $5 billion. The under-writing fees on the other hand will lead to millions of dollars that the Banks will share between them as profits.

Not so for the investors. The risk is entirely theirs because Facebook is devoid of any credible asset base or a sustained revenue track record  or any other reliable valuation criteria. Facebook had posted its first profit of $1 billion last year on a revenue base of $3.7 billion, a tenth of  internet search giant Google.

Credit rating agencies in the US  normally do not step in to warn investors,unless there is a bond issue. Not even the media or non-profits are warning investors though the Facebook growth curve is tapering off in mature markets like the US and Canada. It added just 3 million users to its north American user base of 179 million in the last quarter of 2011 as against 7 million in the previous quarter. Will Facebook manage to meet investors expectations in view of its hyped IPO valuation?

The US Government has in past advised against curtailment of Twitter accounts of Somalia’s radical Islamist groups and also put pressure on cutting of support to Julian Assange the beleaguered Wiki leaks Chief whom it plans to prosecute.

India, the world’s most populous democracy had its information minister Kapil Sibal ranting against Google, FB and Twitter following highlighting of several mega corruption scandals in the social networks. He has now issued formal directives to the websites to cut off the content that is politically and communally offensive. British Prime Minister David Cameron threatened to black out Twitter, Facebook and Blackberry during the infamous London riots last year. The French and the German have been practicing selective blackouts without announcements on a regular basis against Islamist preachers that creates no ripples in the media.

Dictatorships like Libya, Syria,  Saudi Arabia,Iran, Venezuela, Congo, Korea and China have traditionally imposed censorship though other than China no one has been able to really enforce discipline on the web. China resorts to both defensive measures like blocking and aggressive initiatives like hacking to force compliance. Google reluctantly agreed to abide by China’s laws before its annual license renewal in July 2010 after a seven month long resistance last year.

During this seven month standoff Google lost its entire network of Adsense agents in mainland China to rival search engine the Chinese language Baidu. Today Baidu is much bigger than Google in China and controls major part of the searches and dominates the local ad market. Google lost more than a third of its market share and its valuation during the 7 month scrap.

Twitter lost its China market to the local homegrown equivalent of the micro blogging site Sina Weibo following Twitter’s ban in China in early 2009.Now the Chinese version has a following of 100 million local users against a Twitter’s global following of 175 million users. Considering that China is today the fastest growing global market place with 600 million empowered urban consumers in its population of 1.4 billion, it has the capacity to make or break markets.

The China market is too huge to lose for Google, Facebook or Twitter. So the Social media websites are planning to follow Google way and adhere to local laws. If Google can compromise to re-enter China then why should not Twitter or Facebook?

Mason elaborated that unlike Google or Facebook, Groupon is an operation based sales and marketing company whose on field presence with local commerce is more important than cyber presence.

“We talk to thousands of merchants on a daily basis, so that is a huge human component” said Mason explaining that his was a complex hybrid company whose technology and human components of business model was not easy to replicate as some may think. He said that his company believed in local commerce and was involved in bringing the customer to the door-step of the local stores. It was just the reverse of taking the store to the customer as in e commerce and needed a lot of human involvement.

Mason said that the complexity of his business model had made early cash rich competitors like web giants Google, Facebook, Opentable and Yelp quit the field. Growing to a subscriber base of 150 million in just 3 years is not easy. However that could happen only because it was supported by an interesting supply chain of offered products with verified inventory levels. This needed a large field presence or human component that has justified his large sales team of 10,000 employees.

Mason surprised all by claiming that 70% of the staff was employed outside the US. He said that ultimately his goal was to change the way people shop locally, and give more buying power to consumers as well as help stores manage their inventory levels in a better way. Now with dozens of goods being added daily across many categories like travel and shopping, his company was increasingly playing the role of a curator making the demand find the supply instead of being only a dealmaker.

Five ways for using Facebook and Twitter Trends to find your next blog topic

Identify

Customers often provide the precursor to what will be hot over the next year. Either they discuss something they saw or something that they think “is cool.” The key for your business is to get ahead of the trend and make it your own. If you discern a trend before it becomes trendy, you can write about it in a blog. By detecting a trend and then writing about it, people will see your business as a leader in offering new products and services.

Facebook and Twitter provide the best venues for you to learn about pending trends. Moreover, schedule regular visits to TagDef, which is a portal that tracks trending topics. TagDef also allows your business to search for keywords related to your product and service mix. Your business must spots trends before they become apparent to other businesses in your industry.

Questions

Social media websites, such as Twitter and Facebook, allows your business to identify the questions people ask about your products and services. You can answer the questions by addressing each one on your website’s blog. If you sell sporting goods, you may find on social media websites that people want to learn more about lightweight tents. You can produce a short blog that addresses all facets of purchasing a tent.

Social networking search tools also determine the specific type of information that people seek. Your business can identify tweets or Facebook posts that include highly sought after industry keywords. In the case of tents, you can search for tweets or posts than mention “lightweight tents.” Moreover, search through messages and compile a list of those that ask questions relevant to your business niche.

Study

Facebook and Twitter provide a bounty of marketing research information. Yet, you can find your next blog topic by simply measuring the effectiveness of past advertising campaigns. If you see the same Facebook and Twitter advertisements running every week, then you have stumbled upon potential topics for your blog. These advertisements perform well, which means the target audience likes the information provided. Track the ads that frequently run on Facebook and Twitter. Record specific ad text, link addresses, and images to identify patterns that make the ads a success. If you discern prevailing themes to the text, images, and link addresses, then your business can compile a list of potential blog topics. Utilize social media analytic tools and study the information to identify the hot-button issues.

Test a Blog Topic

If you are not sure of a potential blog topic will attract a vast audience, then utilize Facebook and Twitter by testing different topics with tweets and posts. Monitor responses to your communications and compile a list of the most popular topics. If you want to run a blog about the best camping spots in the United States, then you would broach the topic on a Facebook Wall or tweet via twitter. The response level that you receive will determine if you follow through with a blog about the topic.

Polls

Polls are not just for politicians. The key to finding a popular blog topic is to discover what matters most to customers. Testing a topic, studying information to find a popular blog topic, and identifying frequent questions can lead you to your next blog topic. However, why not go straight to the source and poll your followers.

Social networking websites give you direct access to your customers. Enhance this direct connection by asking questions, such as “What product do you need more information on?” Followers who feel that you have engaged them are more likely to read about topics that concern them.

Finding the next blog topic for your business does not have to be a guessing game. Facebook and Twitter provides a wealth of information that will direct you in the right direction.

The newly launched “Search + Your World” is the bone of contention. As per Google, content from its social media platform will get direct entry into Google Search.

The problem is that the content depth of Google+ is lacking. So we have to deal with more irrelevant searches in the popular first page of Google search, knowing well that it’s a drag to enter page 2.

After a decade of hard work Google had established itself as the largest neutral aggregator of web content for worldwide use and thereby a reliable search engine. Last week it suddenly threw it all away and appeared more interested in pushing its fledgling social media at the cost of independent news. A media platform that has yet to establish credentials as a fully accepted mature social media entity like Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn or Flickr and lacks worthwhile content that qualifies as news.

Google+ user base is pretty irregular and indefinite with its growth curve slowing down after the first month hoopla. No amount of pushes and props seem to make it a social media force that can seriously challenge the consistency and content depth of its major competitors at least in the next two years. For all we know it may fold up a few years down the line like its failed predecessors Google Wave or Google Buzz. Now Google+ You Tube and Picasa will clutter up your web search as never before. “So users have seriously started looking at Bing as the default search engine” claim the Tech Gurus.

In February 2011 faced with user discontent on the quality of search results, Google had changed its algorithm favoring higher ranked sites with original content. Bloomberg reported Google as stating “This update is designed to reduce rankings for low- quality sites — sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.” Everyone who had been miffed with the laborious search through the Google’s million results for relevant information seemed happy. Now less than a year later Google has done an about turn. It has pushed forward low quality content from Google+ upfront. This Larry Page effort of tweaking the basic Google model to save Google+ may bring the cookie jar tumbling.

What does social media’s popularity mean for your business? You understand the importance of recruiting new customers via social media. Moreover, your social media strategies must target certain groups in order for your plan to be successful. The question for your business is how you manage all of your social media accounts. You want to streamline, consolidate, and analyze your social media marketing plan in the most efficient way possible. Online businesses have originated over the past five years to do just that. These businesses give you 5 tools to help you manage and grow your social media effort online.

CONVERSOCIAL

Conversocial has developed a comprehensive set of tools and applications that connect you with your customers by quickly processing interactions, prioritizing complaints, and accurately analyzing a conversation history database. The upstart online social media manager provides an innovative analytics tool that measures the success of your updates throughout the day.

Your business depends on feedback to produce the products and services your customers want. Conversocial allows your business to track customer satisfaction and the effectiveness of your customer service. You want to take care of complaints before a disgruntled customer spreads negative word of mouth. You can assign Facebook comments and Twitter tweets to designated employees who are experts in a specific area of customer service.

ENGAGE SCIENCES

With the rapid burgeoning of social media websites, your business needs to find a way to consolidate social media marketing efforts to save money and time. Engage Sciences has developed a platform that allows your business to view messages, comments, and post replies across all of your Facebook and Twitter channels. Real time metrics give you insight into how many likes and dislikes a post receives. Engage Science has created an application that targets “influential” posters and tracks their engagement scores and activity levels.

Perhaps the most effective tool offered by Engage Science embeds social offers into the confirmation page on your website’s sales page. This gives customers a chance to share deals and promotional information with their friends. Your business can embed special offers into a display widget or YouTube video. Engage Science takes time-tested word of mouth advertising to an entirely new level.

MESSAGE MAKER

How would your business like simultaneously spreading your message across a large number of online social interaction points? Message Maker has developed a proprietary application called MessageMaker Social to accomplish such a social media marketing task.

Using MessageMaker Social, your business can publish and manage content across a wide spectrum of online social interaction points. You maintain brand consistency, maximize social engagement opportunities, and generate information that your business can immediately react on. MessageMaker Social eliminates the “one Facebook fits all” mindset, and replaces it with an application that manages disparate social media initiatives across a vast array of pages and accounts. Control the flow of information and protect the integrity of your brand!

HOOTSUITE

Hootsuite consolidates your social media marketing strategies into a “dashboard” that manages multiple social websites, schedules messages and tweets, analyzes all social traffic, and determines which customer service issues require immediate attention. This social media management website creates custom reports that track brand sentiment, new follower growth, and likes/dislikes. Your business can incorporate Facebook Insights and Google analytics into the dashboard. The Hootsuite dashboard has customization tools that meet your company’s needs.

Social media management is more than just engaging customers. You also want to communicate with every member of your organization. Hootsuite keeps members of your business comprised of the latest social media information. Share reports and create ways for team members to discuss social media strategies in real time.

SPROUT SOCIAL

Social media management entails providing all of the tools your business needs into one marketing basket. Sprout Social provides tools that help your business monitor, engage, measure, and grow customers.

You can publish updates and monitor your brand across social channels with just one click. The discovery tools connect your business with preferred customers. Your business has the capability to analyze statistics such as customer check-ins and visitor loyalty. Sprout Social helps your business understand the demographics of your followers and craft messages that allow you to interact better with them.

Social media management means consolidating your marketing efforts under one technological hood. The importance of consolidation simply measures in saved time and money. Your business has multiple tools to enhance the effectiveness of your social media marketing campaign. As we move forward, you can expect even more innovations to occur in this dynamic field.

It is natural that small businesses will have fewer resources at their disposal that can be utilised for online marketing campaigns but this isn’t to say that they won’t be able to achieve some extremely positive results for their website within their budget. A good team of internet marketing professionals will have the necessary knowledge and skills to tailor a target campaign that will help to yield results for small businesses.

Differentiating the Types of Small Businesses Online

First and foremost, an awful lot of small businesses will just have a purely informational site that has no capacity to purchase their products or services online. This type of website is extremely commonplace amongst small businesses as they don’t have the capacity to venture into the world of ecommerce at the present time. However, with platforms such as Magento and Shopify, it is becoming much easier for these types of businesses to take their retail efforts online.

In terms of providing SEO to a client who only has an informational site, there are still a variety of tangible benefits of doing this. In most cases, the small businesses with purely informational websites will have a retail shop or some sort of premises for customers to visit so undertaking an online marketing campaign can be instrumental in driving traffic to the website which will increase the company’s visibility and this will usually have a positive impression on footfall to their business premises.

The other type of website that many small businesses tend to have is a small but not well optimised online shopping facility. Having ecommerce capabilities but no site traffic doesn’t make much of an impression on a company’s sales figures so it is always worthwhile scoping out a team of online marketing professionals to establish the sort of services that they can provide from an SEO perspective to help increase the flow of traffic to your website and, more importantly, ensure that this increase in traffic converts into more sales for your business.

Both these types of websites that are commonly utilised by small businesses can benefit from an SEO campaign but it is important to set out some goals in the first instance and share these with the online marketing professionals whose services you choose to utilise as this will give them a target to work towards.

It doesn’t matter what type of website that you have and the goals that you hope to achieve – a skilled team of online marketing professionals will be able to work alongside you to help your website realise its potential. Most internet marketing and SEO agencies will also offer web design services, so it may well be the case that you will be able to kill two birds with one stone by making your site more appealing from a visual perspective whilst also simultaneously making it more SEO friendly and attractive to the search engines.

The apps of mbrace2 telematics will be supported by a high-resolution color screen near the dashboard and a high-speed wireless Internet connection. Though the app may not go down well with the law makers striving to keep distractions away from the drivers, the car maker says that it will permit only limited features after ensuring that they are safe and useful for the driver.

The Facebook offer with the Mercedes Benz will be a stripped down utility version with limited features specially built around the location map and friends and businesses said the the Product Manager  of the Telematics division.

Dan Rose, VP of Partnerships and Platform Marketing at Facebook feels that with the advent of internet in motor vehicles, it is logical that social media also follows suit. “Now that cars have screens that are intelligent, you would expect that more and more car manufacturers will want to make those screens capable of allowing people to connect with their friends and take advantage of the social context that comes along with that,” he stated in an interview to Reuters “One of the core things that people do on their screens in the car is GPS navigation and the ability to see which of your friends are nearby is something we think will be really interesting for people.”

Robert Policano the Product Manager of the Mercedes engineering team that spent months at Palo Alto to build the application says that any Facebook activity that is required to enter text while driving is automatically disabled during driving. However a list of standard pre-written postings like destination, likely time of arrival at a location and updates can be made by turning a knob or taps if the route is entered into the vehicles navigational system. Drivers can also check on restaurants or stores liked by friends at a nearby location. However all 3rd party applications like the popular games Farmville and Angry Birds shall be kept out of the system, though other social networks like Google and Yelp shall be permitted.

The internet has made shopping so easy, you don’t even have to leave your bed – you can find a local pizza delivery shop, order clothes online, and even find a virtual assistant to help you run your business. Finding what you need is as easy as the click of a mouse, and this is why internet commerce is booming. It is also why savvy small business owners are learning how to use basic search engine optimization (SEO) strategies to help their website get found by the people searching for their product or service online.

Small businesses in all niches know that competition is stiff; however, with a small investment of time and energy, a business’s website can rise to the top and eventually dominate their market online.

Here are 3 proven search engine optimization tips to help you get more traffic to your small business website and set yourself apart from the competition.

1. WordPress Rules! Any small business search engine optimization specialist will tell you that WordPress is the top platform for setting up your website. With their clean coding and up-to-date programming, they are the platform of choice for SEO experts hoping to rank a website in Google. If you are starting out with a new site, do it in WordPress. If you already have an established site, consider strongly moving it to WordPress. It’s the best engine that will help you race right to the top of search results in your niche.

2. Buy A URL With Your Target Keyword In It. The first step to superior rankings in the major search engines is having your keyword in your URL. If you are a pest control company in Georgia, doesn’t georgiapestcontrol.com seem like a great place to start? So many business owner spend time developing catchy names and then buy their URL with the name in it. That’s fine if you have a big marketing budget to promote your site, but if you’re a small business owner operating on a limited marketing budget, you’ll get much better results by choosing a simple URL with your keyword in it. and if you already have an established site, you can always re-direct the traffic from your “keyword-friendly” site to your established site.

3. Blog Constantly. Their are two big benefits to blogging. First, you probably already know that Google loves content. Filling up your website with lots of great content ensures that Google will come back to your site again and again. This will help you get each page of your site indexed – that is – stored in Google’s cache, so that it can be found online. Additionally, each time you write a new blog post, you give yourself one more chance to be found by potential customers who are interested in what you are selling. Be creative and write lots of good, quality content and people will find you. You’ll slowly begin to get followers and start to generate traffic over time, if you keep at it.