One of the toughest things for many business bloggers is to think of things to write about. Here's a great technique that helps to generate ideas that are guaranteed to be of interest to your audience.

First, I believe that one of the best things that everyone should be doing is reading the publications that your customers and the others in your industry read.

Gather at least a year's worth of issues of those magazines (hopefully 3 years) together into one place to use as resource materials. Then make copies of their tables of contents and post them side by side up on a wall someplace. Look at the commonalities that you see between those publications.

These are trends that are being consistently being talked about through published trade media for your particular industry. So you can assume that either those trends are what your audience is interested in knowing about, or that your particular trade's media is suffering from mass delusion (somewhat unlikely).

Those trends should give you a pretty good idea of you what you should be blogging about. Of course, the more recent issues should be weighted more heavily in your analysis.

It's one of the most powerful tools you can use because you're being told exactly what people are interested in.

Want to learn more about how to write better business blogs with less effort while still ensuring that appropriate review and control procedures are in place to help keep your company out of trouble? Check out our new report Business Blogging Results: How To Create and Write A Blog That Builds Your Business.