How to Use Blogs to Develop Great Ideas

Repurpose your content to maximize your exposure

By Richard Nacht

RISMEDIA, December 14, 2006?Ever had an idea hit you that might be good fodder for an e-mail or print newsletter? The idea germinates in your head and you wish you had some convenient place to write it down which you could come back to for later development. Behold the blog!

One of the many benefits to blogging is as a seedbed for archiving ideas which can be built upon and used in another form. You see, content on a blog doesn’t have to appear in its final, elaborated version. A blog post can be as brief as paragraph or two?even sentence or two?which you jot down extemporaneously knowing that it is safely archived by category and date for later use as the need arises. You could even create a blog solely for that purpose.

I use this technique all the time with ideas for my column. What eventually makes its way to the pages of Real Estate magazine often gets its start as a blog post. In fact, I will very often write a series of blog posts on a topic which I can come back to and edit, then compile for use elsewhere. It’s called repurposing content, and a blog makes a wonderful ?nursery? for idea germination. For example, over the course of several weeks, I wrote a series of posts about social media marketing on my blog at RealBlogging.com. Those posts found their way into last month’s column entitled “Become More Social.” (You read it, didn?t you?)

Let’s take this a step further. Repurposing content doesn’t have to be relegated to that which originates on a blog. Suppose you write a weekly real estate column for your local newspaper. Take that same piece and use it in an e-mail newsletter to your subscriber list. Or, better yet, do that and use it in a blog post.

One of the advantages to adopting this practice is that you can be assured copy over which you labored and toiled will receive greater readership.

That is especially true with the advent of the next generation Web?referred to as the Web 2.0 or the ?participatory? Web. Using sites like Digg (www.digg.com), Reddit (www.reddit.com) and Newsvine (www.newsvine.com), which are completely driven by consumer-submitted content, you can extend the reach of your material to a larger audience that you might have imagined. Nothing appears on any of these sites that someone like you and me did not put there. Further, there is no top-level editorial control that prohibits some articles from being published and others not. The “editors” are other readers like yourself who rate content based on their perception of its worth.

You can even aid this along by sending links to friends and associates asking that they rate the content, positively of course. Ratings work like votes for the article?the more you get, the higher the article is ranked in the site. The higher the ranking, the greater the visibility the article receives; the greater the visibility, the more people who read it.

A front page listing on Digg, for instance, is an almost certain guarantee your article will be seen by thousands of site visitors. Since many of them will be bloggers, it’s within reason to think your content will be referred to on their blogs, extending its reach even further. See why they call it the participatory Web!

Just think, not unlike the mighty oak which gets its start as a tiny seed, using the right techniques, that little idea you planted on your blog could potentially germinate and grow into something syndicated around the Internet,.

So, the next time you have an idea pop into your head, plant it on your blog. You never know what may grow from it.

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