One of the great ways is to read other peoples business blogs – and not always blogs in your own business niche as you can be inspired to develop content learning from others.

So here are seven ideas that might help you develop a content strategy for your business blog:

1. Get ideas from your RSS feeds – remember to model not copy articles respecting the copyright of the original site where the content is posted and always give attribution and a link to the source article

2. Explore the blogs listed in the Technorati blog directory HERE or in other niche directories

3. Review the list of business blogs that are listed in other peoples blog rolls – the list that many bloggers have on the side bar of their business blog

4. Do a search within Google using the Google Blog search engine to find other business blogs for inspiration

5. Review your email, your Facebook Page or Tweets that you receive for questions that your people ask you and turn those answers into blog articles

6. Think about the questions your clients and customers have asked you over the last 3 months and turn those questions into articles – but make sure that you don’t disclose confidential information about your clients

7. Look at award winners of business blogging competitions – for example the short list of the Digital Marketing Awards which was announced recently and hosted by Ashville Media – you will find the shortlist HERE or the list of blogs nominated for a blogging award for Best Business Blog with the Irish Blog Awards

• Brown Blog Films
• Caricatures Ireland
• Contrast
• Curious Wines
• Decisions For Heroes
• Garren Denny Lane Interiors
• Ice Cream Ireland
• Irish Mortgage Brokers
• Komplett Ireland
• Krishna De – yes that’s me!
• LouderVoice
• Made In Hollywood
• Moore Groups Blog
• Motorcheck.ie Blog
• MyHome.ie Blog
• Nice Day Designs
• Outdoors Ireland
• Pat Phelan
• PuddleDucks
• RevaHealth.com Blog
• Sabrina Dent
• Sales 2.0 Network
• Simply Zesty
• Sugru
• Toddle
• Wood Ale Designs

Note: If you already have a business blog and are in Ireland you might be interested in being nominated for the IIA Net Visionary Awards 2010 – nominations for best business blog and best business podcast are open along side many other categories through until 26 arch 2010.

What other ways do you get inspiration for content for your business blog articles and content plan?

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His event is called ‘Bringing Balance to Life and Purpose to Work’.

This is short notice so please leave a message for me over on my Facebook Page and I’ll be delighted to give the first 5 people who respond the ticket. Please make sure that you let me know your email address so I can connect you to the event organisers.

The Event takes place in the D4 Ballsbridge Inn (Former Jurys Hotel, Ballsbridge) on Wednesday 10 March at 7:30 pm until 9:30 pm.  Individual tickets to the seminar are €37.00 and 2 for €50.00 – however I have 5 free tickets thanks to Ria Lawlor of Horizon Speakers.

Full details of the event are at the event website for John Demartini in Dublin.

This is not an affiliate link or programme – just a kind gift from Horizon Speakers.

So the first 5 people who respond to this on my Facebook Page will be allocated the tickets. Please note I will be at a conference today so it will be early afternoon before I confirm your details have been registered.

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As usual however, one of the great things about attending conferences is the opportunity to meet interesting people and one of the people I connected with today was Deirdre Waldon of Agency.com.

In our conversation I discovered that their agency had developed the iPhone App for the National Lottery in Ireland and I also learned that they had had a significant numbers of downloads of their first version of the Lottery.ie iPhone app without any advertising or significant launch programme.

So I invited Deirdre to share a few thoughts on my AudioBoo podcast series that I have been recording where I’ve been in conversation with people about their favourite iPhone apps. You can listen to the short interview where we cover:

- ideas for why you might consider an iPhone app for your business

- tips for leveraging the facilities of the iPhone when developing your app

- how the iPhone app for Lottery.ie is part of the 360 engagement plan and the mobile strategy for their business

- how they achieved the number of downloads without a main launch.

What ideas does this give you for developing your iPhone application for your business as part of your 360 marketing and communications programme?

If you haven’t listened to the rest of the series of podcasts I have recorded with people in my network sharing their favourite iPhone apps, you can do so HERE.

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The Forum on Public Procurement, which represents many Irish public sector buyers and suppliers, proposes to open a debate on how small but significant changes in the public procurement process can assist in restoring economic confidence, generate economic activity and offer innovative solutions benefitting the procurement professionals, Irish suppliers and ultimately the taxpayer.

Public Procurement is worth in the region of €15 billion annually and supports some 250,000 jobs in Ireland.

I have personally found that many Irish companies are experiencing difficulties in accessing public contracts due to increased competition and changing market conditions.

A one day conference is taking place this week and will be chaired by David McWilliams, and will examine the potential opportunities that public procurement can offer in contributing to the stabilisation of Irish business and the creation of new jobs, while at the same time delivering vital public services of high quality.

The conference details cam be found HERE and is being organised by the Forum on Public Procurement, a not for profit voluntary organisation, established in 1996 and which represents organisations and individuals concerned with purchasing within the public sector in Ireland.

Conference: THE FPP ANNUAL CONFERENCE 2010 – Promoting Recovery Through Public Procurement

Date: Thursday 25 February 2010

Venue: Westbury Hotel, Dublin 2

Time: 9am-5pm

The Panel of Experts includes Darragh O’Brien, T.D., Deputy Chair of the Dáil Public Accounts Committee Pat Delaney, Director, IBEC Billy Noone, Department of Finance Emmett Devlin, Procurement Officer, South Dublin County Council Tony Redmond, Procurement Manager, Railway Procurement Agency Cecil Ryan, Regional Managing Director – Europe, OCS Padraig Twomey, Group Procurement Manager, Bord Gáis Eireann.

HOW TO WIN A TICKET TO THE CONFERENCE

If you would like to win my TICKET here’s what to do – just tell me in 150 words or less the benefit to you of attending the conference and how you would be plan to share your insights with colleagues in your network so that one ticket benefits many.

I do hope you will be interested in attending as I am not able to do so. Go ahead – over to you – just leave your comments below. Entries to be in by midnight Ireland/UK time on Tuesday 23 February 2010.

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REVIEW OF YOUR COUNTRY YOUR CALL

‘Your Country Your Call’ is a new project and is a countrywide competition to identify and reward two proposals that, when implemented, they can help to secure job creation and a prosperous future for Ireland. There will be two competition winners and the winning proposers will each receive a cash prize of €100,000. Both winning proposals will then be implemented with the support of an independent working group and with a development fund of up to €500,000 for each project.

President Mary McAleese launched the programme on 17 February 2010 – opening up the Irish Times yesterday you would have seen an article and a full page spread to help build awareness of the programme.

From a social media perspective, the organising team reached out to a number of people who are active in the area of social media including  Darragh Doyle, Brendan Hughes, Pat Phelan and myself for input ahead of the launch to share ideas and assist in gaining online visibility of the project – now that is forward thinking and I know that those of us invited to comment welcomed the opportunity to share ideas for the programme which has the potential to truly impact the future prosperity of Ireland.

Take a look at their website and you will find there is a link to a Facebook page, a Twitter Profile, a YouTube channel, a LinkedIn group and a Flickr channel. There is also a facility to share the content to social networks and to book mark content.

You will see on the YouTube channel a short video about the blogger outreach event that they held on the 15 February (unfortunately I was not able to attend).

The project team have allocated resources to supporting the social media channels and it is great to see that there is a real commitment to this channel for communications.

My three recommendations for the project in terms of helping their online visibility of their content online at the moment would be:

1. to have a more complete profile and more effective descriptions, titles and tags on their YouTube channel videos

2. adding a full profile, titles, descriptions and tags on their Flickr channel and allow some of the photo’s to be available to use under Creative Commons licence. That way bloggers who were not at their launch event can add images to their blog posts

3. adding a full description and a URL to their Twitter channel so people can find their web page about the programme easily.

You can read Brendan’s blog post about his experience of attending the blogger event for Your Country Your Call here.

BALLYGOWAN BOTTLES GO PINK

I have to disclose that Ballygowan sparkling water is my bottled water of choice! On Sunday 14 February I was made aware that Ballygowan had changed it’s dress – it had gone pink.

In a 360 marketing campaign which I first came across on TV, Ballygowan announced that it had launched a new campaign to raise awareness and funds for breast cancer in association with the Marie Keating Foundation in the Republic of Ireland and Action Cancer in Northern Ireland.

Every bottle sold will raise funds for breast cancer awareness and contribute towards cancer support projects.

Ballygowan Pink has a microsite and a Facebook page which already has almost 4000 fans.

The campaign which was managed by McConnells Integrated encompasses TV and Radio, an is in consumer and trade press and on outdoor posters. My one observation on the TV launch was that as a consumer it did come across to me as being a bit too repetitive – I think every ad break I saw on Sunday featured Ballygowan Pink.

From a PR perspective I was thrilled and surprised to find that a case of Ballygowan Pink bottles had been delivered to me – this being organised by the PR team of WHPR. I have had to confiscate the bottles from my three daughters or they would have all gone by now.

You see what I thought I would do is take bottles of Ballygowan Pink with me to events and locations that I know I am meeting female colleagues or clients. Yes my household could drink the bottles of water ourselves – but instead as a blogger who also lives in the real world, what better way to spread the word than sharing a bottle with a friend! You see I want my friends to ‘be part of it’.

In fact the campaign has had such an impact on me in terms of getting into my subconscious that when I attended a women’s networking event last night I found myself wondering why I could not see Ballygowan Pink bottles being served!

What I did do is take a couple of bottles with me – one to pass to my friend and colleague Emma, and one to drink myself.

So there we have it – one established brand and one new campaign both embracing 360 marketing here in Ireland.

Both also engaging bloggers to help them share their message with the world.

What other 360 marketing campaigns of note have caught your attention this month?

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Google just might have the answer for you – in this video I go through how to use the Google Wonderwheel search tool to help you with ideas for your topics.

Of course – model NEVER copy someone elses articles won’t you!

What other places do you like to get ideas for topics for your articles? Here are three other ideas that you might find of assistance:

1. Questions that you receive from clients or prospects – how can you turn those questions into an online article, content for your newsletter, an idea for on online video tutorial or podcast episode?

2. Your RSS feeds – if you subscribe to news channels, websites or other peoples blogs, their articles might give you an idea for a topic to write or speak about

3. The calendar – could you write something that is relevant to the time of year either in the annual calendar or the calendar related to your industry or sector?

Check out Google Wonderwheel and let me know what you think – is it a tool you would you could imagine using?

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What platform can you use if you have an audience who does not want to or can not install webinar technology on their computer due to restrictions in terms of their IT policy? Can you have a webinar where you can view it from your browser without installing anything to your computer?

These are areas I often discuss with my clients – in fact only today I was talking with a client about how to use webinars as part of their revenue generating model and for helping people use their product more effectively.

I have had the opportunity this week to trial a service that I have been aware of for a number of years – in fact it is founded by a colleague here in Ireland – OnlineMeetingRooms.com. Joe Garde is a well liked and well known entrepreneur and his services are used byt companies across the world. They have recently released a new service that enables your webinar participant to watch the webinar from their browser.

Joe gave me access to his sevice at no cost to use to connect to some participants from a programme I had recently run. You can see my review of the service in the video below.

I have been hosting teleseminars and webinars for 5 years – however here in Ireland not too many organisations host webinars and teleseminars at the moment. With services like OnlineMeetingRooms.com and their new simple webinar service, I predict that may change!

Out of interest here are the results of the polls I ran today with the participants – the webinar was about blogging, podcasting and online video:

• How likely are you to implement social media in your business in the next 90 days – 60% of the participants said yes, 20% did not vote and 20% were unsure
• Have you ever attended a webinar previously – 30 of the attendees had attended a webinar previously
• Would you attend a webinar in the future is it was a paid event – 75% of the attendees said yes!
• Was the OnlineMeetingRooms.com webinar platform easy to use – 100% of the attendees said yes.

No these results are not statistically significant as the group was small – however it does provide me with some insights.

What webinar services do you like and recommend?

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But what if the testimonial you receive is incorrect, or you want it to more accurately reflect what you did and who you worked for?

Or has the company name changed since you worked there due to a merger?

I was asked how to change the information in endorsements by someone in my network today – so here is a quick video about how to request changes to the endorsements that you receive through LinkedIn.

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Then he emailed me the questions he wanted to cover in the interview – well really thought starters for what he wanted to explore and my heart sank. Not they weren’t great questions.

It’s just that Michael has this ability to make us think – to reflect – to self analyse. That is what makes him one of Canada’s leading coaches. Michael is on a mission to shake up peoples lives.

He made me STOP. I love what I am doing in my career right now. But just because I love it, am I doing ‘Great Work’? I am not talking about work that is technically competent, that my clients appreciate. I am talking about work that has real meaning, stretches you and makes a difference to those around you – leaving a footprint on the people in your own life or even in the world.

Michael has been interviewing people about thier Great Work including leading authorities such as David Ulrich, David Allen, Marshall Goldsmith, Jim Koezes, Henry Mintzberg, Lance Secretan, Dan Pink, Hugh McLeod, Garr Reynolds, Pam Slim – and now me!

If you are interested in leading a little about my own experiences of what great work is you can listen to the interview I did with Michael here. We cover:

• Why stability is as important as risk as the foundation for Great Work
• What dealing with the threats from the Mafia taught her about Great Work (yes really THE Mafia)
• How to become CEO of your own career – and what support structures you might up in place to allow that to happen
• How to rail against the threat of a mediocre life.

I can not believe what I revealed to Michael – because like all great coaches he left me wide open space but provoked me to think, reflect and learn.

Michael’s book ‘Find Your Great Work’ distinguishes what Great Work is – he defines:

• Bad Work as the mind-numbing, soul-sapping stuff that all systems seems to generate. The company Richer Sounds has a ‘cut the crap’ committee – and Bad Work is what they seek out to eliminate.

• Good Work as the efficient, productive, useful, comfortable day-to-day work that fills most of our lives. There’s nothing wrong with Good Work. Organizations love Good Work, it is their “cash cow”, the reliable and tested way to make money. When you think back on the week that’s just passed … and can’t remember much about how you spent those 40 or 50 or 60 hours, that’s a sign you’re doing a lot of Good Work. (It’s all rushed into your subconscious mind, as your conscious mind has decided there’s nothing much new here to remember.)

• Great Work as the work that takes you to the edge of who you are, your learning edge, the work that stretches and inspires you. People and organisations alike are ambivalent about Great Work. It’s rewarding and risky, inspiring and frightening, compelling and paralysing. It takes focus and courage to do Great Work.

So here is an exercise for you this weekend should you want to accept it – these are the questions Michael gave me – why not reflect on them yourself and do a little ’self coaching’.

• What’s a Great Work story of your own?

• What helped you say Yes to Great Work? To what did you have to say No?

• What insights/tips/secrets/musings do you have on Great Work?

• What’s your Great Work now?

What reflections do you have about your work today – are you doing Great Work? What have you learned from this exercise?

P.S. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Michaels Great Work interviews over at his website and if you are inspired to do more great work remember you can buy ‘Find Your Great Work’ at all leading booksellers. I’ll be interviewing Michael soon – so leave me your questions for what you would like me to ask him about how to find and do great work – just leave a comment below.

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Last year Hitwise reported that in the UK, Internet searches for discount vouchers had increased by 47.5% over the last 12 months (reported in August 2009).

In a recent video tutorial about using Google Local to boost your online visibility results, I mentioned how Google Local also allows you to add a discount voucher or coupon for your services to your profile. When recording that video I noticed that there is a new Gadget enabled for coupons in iGoogle.com which many people use as their default profile to manage their news, RSS feeds, calendar and even email.

So here is a quick video about how you too can benefit as a consumer in terms of accessing discounts and coupons being offered in your location from businesses using the Google Local tool and the neat integration with iGoogle.

As a business owner it’s free for you to use too – so what offer could you try out and test in terms of bringing more business to your door – can you hear the Kerhing of your cash register now?

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