Creating content

Often the hardest thing about blogging is thinking up content. Obviously, if you are launching a new product or service - there's plenty to blog about. But, what if you are just working away - what can you possibly write about?

• Events and happenings in your industry or consider creating a calendar for your industry.
• Use Google Alerts to stay on top of relevant keywords and comment on media stories about your niche.
• Create a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) section to your blog to explain acronyms and common questions about your business.
• Seek a broad range of people for interviews, including industry leaders, emerging entrepreneurs and researchers.
• Discuss local issues with the organizations and people relevant to your business.
  

Getting creative

When times get tough, entrepreneurs need to get creative.

Industry conferences and seminar can be expensive, but they are also great ways to network and stay abreast of what's the newest trends. In tough economic times, our marketing budgets can't always support the ticket price. However, many conferences will let you attend if you volunteer some hours to the conference.

For the cost of a couple of hours of your time - you still get to network, you still get to be seen by your peers, you get a little closer to the event organizers and you haven't drained the bank account.

Blogging matters

For those of you following our little traffic ranking exercise -

When we started this exercise (9/22), Dohertyassoc.com had a Alexa traffic rank of: 3,740,178. In October, we had a traffic rank of 1,969,422, January 2009 was 1,183,946, April we had gotten to 869,376.

Currently Doherty's traffic rank is 1,696,815

So what happened? We got busy, and let the website slide and lo and behold - no new content, traffic slips.