Category Archives: Best Of The Blog

To develop fresh ideas I would recommend the following:

1. Read the Wall Street Journal, Business Week and such publications and pay attention to what is reported and discussed both in print, online blogs and online forums.

2. Read books on the topic of innovation, Internet marketing and such

3. Attend workshops / seminars

4. Follow blogs of successful thought leaders

5. Meet smart and interesting people, ask questions and start a dialog

6. Create or join a mastermind group

7. Write often

8. Solicit the advice of experts

9. I get tremendous amount of powerful ideas from an online community my company implemented and I moderate http://www.alansforums.com

10. Speaking in conferences or webinars has always generated tremendous mount of great ideas for me when listening to my audience questions

Ideas are all around you, all you have to do is start paying better attention.

1. Unless you have good, interesting and valuable starting content on your forum why would anyone spend time there or consider joining? They are not going to.
2. I would suggest you create a repository of intellectual property (IP) that is available to forum members only and is uniquely position with how-to information.
3. Market to all of your current and previous clients, prospects and anyone you know and share with them the exciting new place / community you have created (after you built the initial content) and invite them to check it out and join.
4. I would charge for membership yet select a smaller group of subscriber that would become the initial group (for free) to start the momentum of posting going.
5. Promote and market your new site and forum in every possible media: news release, networking events, verbally with anyone you talk with, speeches, newsletter, blog, your paperwork (invoices, correspondence), get people to interview you on their blogs (written, audio and video podcasts).
6. Feature the best of the posts in your monthly newsletter (assuming you have one) and create enticements to have new members join.
7. Strive to become “the place to go” for the greatest and latest of your industry wisdom.
8. When possible discuss “success stories” and share on your site and inside the forum.
9. Create a referral network both domestically and internationally that would send your target audience to the forum and to you.

So what is your blog good for? Here are some ideas: It …

1. Enables you to publish your knowledge and wisdom for others to benefit from.
2. Allows you to promote and refer to it on your web site and newsletter and reference interesting threads.
3. Makes it easy for your visitors to subscribe so they may automatically receive your posts via RSS feed.
4. Gives you the flexibility to react to other blogs, news, current events and interesting posts.
5. Lets you promote your products, services, speaking engagements, articles and white papers.
6. Entices others to engage in a conversations and debates with you and others.
7. Positions you as an object of interest, an expert in your field and have other bloggers and web sites refer to your blog and posts.
8. Makes it easy to summarize your presentations and email the notes to attendees prior and after your event.
9. Creates the tool to allow the discipline to produce content to strengthen your brand and marketing gravity.
10. Evolves into a repository of interesting information – a knowledge base.
11. Sharpens your knowledge as you focus on developing and delivering interesting, new and valuable content.
12. Becomes fun as it evolves and once successful creates a community around your work.
13. Permits you to capture your clients’ questions and respond by writing a new post or refer to an old one.
14. Expands your network to reach out to clients, prospects, colleagues and business partners while allowing them to reach out to their network featuring your wisdom.
15. Pushes the envelop by augmenting the written words and creating additional channels of delivery methods such as audios and videos.
16. Strengthens your Internet strategy by adding another domain that creates content for Google and other search engines to find and index.

What are your thoughts?