Often people say “ooh well, I’d like to do a blog or something but how will I know what to write about?”. Well, if you are writing a blog for your business I would like to think you know a lot about your product, services, why people need them and how people use them. Stop worrying about being a great writer and take confidence from the fact that you already know a lot of valuable information.

Then take these simple steps to set up a ready made flow of content ideas. What’s more, this will even help you find out what people want to know about right now.

1. Set up an account on Google Reader – add Google Reader bookmarklet to your browser. This makes it very easy to add RSS feeds from a site that you are visiting (if the site has an RSS).
2. Go to sites that you like with relevant content and add them. This will load up your Google Reader with RSS from other sites.
3. Set up folders in you Google Reader by topic or other heading. Google is a search engine so you can search your feeds very well.
4. Go to Google Alerts and set up alerts for topics that you want to follow. Have the alerts come into your Google Reader.
5. Go to socialmention.com – it is a search engine for social media content. Do searches for topics your interested in – use the ALL tab at the end of the search tabs. That will generate a RSS feed for that search which you can add to your Google Reader.
6. Twitter – set up account on Twitter. Download Seesmic desktop app. In your Seesmic desktop set up searches for the topics that interest you. You can use AND terms search i.e. Croatia AND Villa. This will show you what is a hot topic at the moment and what people are talking about/asking about.
7. LinkedIn – join relevant groups. Then see which discussions have the most amount of comments on them. This will give you a good idea of what is popular right now. Also check when the discussion was first posted (time and day) and other aspects such as the way the title is worded. This will help you learn the best ways to post a topic. If you want to create content for an article ask a question in LinkedIn and reference the answers in your blog post.

I also add RSS feeds for sites that I like to my Pageflakes account. Pageflakes is my Firefox browser homepage. It gives me an alternative way to view articles in my RSS feeds. I prefer to use this when I am simply browsing what people are saying right now – perhaps whilst I have a cup of tea. My Google Reader I use when I am researching. Got any tips for how you plan your content?