Creating consistent and helpful blog content is a great way to build community and trust around your brand for your prospects. It's how you draw the right potential customers to your website. But cranking out daily content is challenging. How can you keep the blog post ideas flowing? How can you keep the content fresh and prevent yourself from re-hashing the same old thing.

Here’s a brainstorm of some ideas to get you started, or just keep you going.

Multi-media and Visuals

1. Do a screencast with Screenr of your product and share it on your blog.

2. Show a step-by-step guide on how to do something in a screencast, how-to video, or show the steps in a series of photos.

3. Create a music video for your company and post it on the blog.

4. Share a cartoon or create an original one.

How-to’s and Tips

5. Write a how-to article. Give instructions with screenshots or photos on the steps someone needs to take to do something.

6. Point out common mistakes in your industry and offer solutions on how to fix or avoid them.

7. Offer a list of benefits for doing something.

8. Share a list of some things to avoid.

9. Relate your how-to content to a current event or a celebrity. Example: “5 _____ Lessons from Lady Gaga” or “What the Election Teaches Us About ____”

Use Existing Content

10. Take the contrarian position – Find someone else’s article that you agree or disagree with. Introduce your blog post with what you specifically agree or disagree with it, and support your argument with a few concise points.

11. Do a weekly or daily links-roundup of relevant news for your community.

12. Find tips in other content, create a list of those tips and give links to those articles as the sources.

13. Share an excerpt from an ebook or white paper with a call to action to download it for the rest of the information.

14. Share an excerpt from an upcoming webinar with a call to action to get the rest of the content in the webinar.

15. Share your slides from a recent presentation.

16. Share conference takeaways.

17. Do a round-up of last year’s/last month’s/last week’s most popular posts.

18. Re-interpret existing content: Collect the top motivational YouTube videos for your audience, top ebooks, top webinars or infographics.

Incorporate Other Platforms

19. Create a Slideshare presentation of new statistics related to your space and share that in a blog post. Tag the Slideshare presentation with relevant keywords for your company to leverage SEO benefits of the platform.

20. Ask a question on Twitter and share the results with a Storify embed.

21. Collect Tweets from a webinar or conference hashtag, show them off with Storify and offer your own takeaways in the blog post.

Research

22. Respond to industry research with your own perspective. Offer a fresh angle to spark conversation.

23. Do a survey with Survey Monkey among your community members and create an infographic based on the results.

24. Do a poll of your Twitter community with a Twtpoll or your Facebook community with a Facebook Question and post the results on your blog.

25. Do an in-depth case study about one company, or offer a few examples of how other companies do something successfully.

Thought Leadership

26. Record an interview with an expert in your field and post it to your blog.

27. Get experts to offer a tip and do a round-up of their recommendations.

28. Feature guest posts from industry experts.

29. Publish responses to frequently asked questions about your industry.

30. Create a list of trends to watch.

31. Compare and contrast: Different products, different approaches, different companies, different people, different places, etc.

32. Do a review of other non-competitive products or services that your community cares about.

33. Be a journalist: Be the first in your space to offer industry takeaways about breaking news.

34. Explain what a current event or topic in the news means for your industry or community. Example: “What ____ Means for ____.” “Why _____ Matters for _____.”

35. De-bunk common myths.

Make it About Your Community

36. Interview your favorite customer.

36. Post a Flickr slideshow of pictures from a recent event.

37. Run a contest and give away something relevant to your community.

38. Ask for guest posts from community members.

39. If you have company news to share, talk about it in a way that makes it about the reader. Example: If someone gets promoted, talk about how why were successful. Inspire your audience.

40. Publish a post relevant to the current season or holiday.

41. Outline the top practical use cases for your product, service etc.

How do you keep the blog posts ideas coming each day for your company blog? Let us know how you stay inspired in the comments!



Read more: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/23973/41-Fresh-Blog-Post-Ideas-For-Your-Company-Blog.aspx#ixzz1YRikaaqk

1. Go out and explore the services. Get yourself set up on Yelp, Foursquare, Gowalla, SCVNGR, and Local Response. Claim your location in those places.

2. Start embracing the influencers that are checking in. Pick one or two services that are right for you (probably Foursquare, and maybe Yelp), and do that.

3. Create your offer. Make sure your offer syncs up with what your business goals are (loyalty, engagement, increase foot traffic, increase sales, etc).

4. Test, learn, optimize, and measure. Keep tabs on what's working and what's not working, and make changes.

5. Operationalize. Train everyone involved (from the top to the bottom) on what the offer is, how it works, and what the purpose is.

Using Location Based Services to Build a Loyalty Program"I think that goes into perpetuity. Every fifth time you go, you're getting this extra benefit, and smart companies will start to think about how do I do that."

Here are a few examples of companies who are using location based services to build up loyalty programs:

• Tasti D-Lite has a loyalty program where, through the swipe of a card, you can check into Foursquare, Twitter, and Facebook. Checking in earns you additional points towards free menu items.
• Starwood Hotels has a similar program where, when you attach your Starwood account with Foursquare, you get additional points for checking in.
• Hideout Theatre has it so you don't just benefit the first time you check in or if you're the mayor, but also during your 5th and 10th visits as well.

Point-of-Purchase and Location Based Services"So I think the more you can tightly tie in some of these elements to the point of sale, the bigger retail stores will embrace this. But I don't know if it's going to be the end-all, be-all. It will definitely add scale. It will add comfort, I think, to a lot of these customers."

A new element that is emerging is a way for businesses to track when people have actually purchased and been inside their business. This builds on loyalty programs, but it can also be used to further relationship building and engagement.

Offering Incentives for Sharing With Your Networks"The more reasons you give for someone sharing their check-in with their Facebook account or other social networks, the better."

It's best to give the user the control on how/what they share with their networks, but the more reasons you give them to share, the better (e.g., "Get more points for sharing your check-in on Facebook.").

What Happens After Check-In"We need to think about the benefit that geo-awareness adds to any kind of transaction business data, etc."

Businesses need to figure out how they can use this information going forward. Can you build check-in information in your loyalty program? Can you add that into your communication with your customers?

Digby (a mobile ecommerce company) is looking into this issue. If they can get you to check-in on an app that they've built, they can passively know whether you've been in a store or not. So then you have that data that you can work with.

What Kinds of Businesses Should Use Location Based Services?"I think if you look at companies like Bravo TV, companies that are either publications or they're consumer package goods, there are things that you can do -- whether they're educational, they can be partnerships with the actual retail locations."

Location based services aren't just for brick-and-mortar businesses with lots of locations. Other types of businesses can partner with retail locations.

For example, you can check in at the Statue of Liberty. When you do, you can pull up a particular show episode on the History Channel and historical facts. The History Channel has partnered with historical locations so that when someone checks in, they're shown History Channel content.

Measuring the Effectiveness of Location Based Marketing"This is a space that will continue to evolve. One of the things that we do have is we have a website. It's LocationBasedMarketingForDummies.com, and that's going to be the book site, and we're going to keep a regular blog there. You'll be able to find out about some of these services as they evolve, because Mike and I will keep wiki pages that will let users contribute as well -- talk about all these different services that can help measure and monitor."

A lot of the platforms offer their own dashboards for tracking who's checked in, demographics, etc.

But there are also a lot of other tools that can help you measure and monitor these campaigns. Some of them are:

• MomentFeed: for tracking across multiple locations and multiple services
• Geotoko: for managing multiple offers
• Valuevine: for all kinds of tracking of location based campaigns
• Local Response: for mining Twitter and finding specific check-ins and making offers to them

Resources for Location Based Marketing Information"I have a list that I've actually built if someone checks out my Twitter handle, @AaronStrout. You can see my LBS Twitter stream that I've got."

Check out @Mr_LBS on Twitter, the Location Based Marketing Association, @JBruin on Twitter, and all of the individual services' Twitter handles and blogs.

Where to Start Your Location Based Marketing Efforts"Try it out as a consumer and check in to some places and get some ideas, and then get your company set up. Claim your location. Think about maybe a light offer that you could do."

If you're just starting out, get set up on Foursquare. Try it as a consumer. Get some ideas. Then claim your location, and work on a light offer.



Read more: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/24508/5-Golden-Rules-for-a-Successful-Location-Based-Marketing-Campaign.aspx#ixzz1XSiHUA8u