LinkedIn is an amazing place. It’s a great place to network. It’s a great place to look up people. It’s a great place to find information.
Now, with all that said, if you are a blogger and you’re looking for great ideas for blog posts, you might be thinking that LinkedIn is off-limits. You might be thinking that there’s some sort of walled garden effect that you’ll have to log in so you can get info. Well, get those ideas out of your head.
Find inspiration with LinkedIn topics
LinkedIn is worth logging into because a lot of knowledgeable people post information having to do with their areas of expertise on LinkedIn all day, every day. Use this fact to your advantage. Unfortunately, a lot of bloggers think that they just have to reverse engineer their competitors by entering keywords into Google and picking apart the results.
While that is a good approach, please understand that a lot of people are also already using that technique. There’s a bit of a saturation issue that you need to be aware of. Another approach is to use Wikipedia or Quora and use the topics raised there to come up with some sort of content map.
That is also a good idea but unfortunately, people are wising up and discovering this technique and these sources are also getting saturated. If you are looking for the final frontier, so to speak, of blog post ideas, you need to jump into LinkedIn. Get in there and just knock yourself out.
There are all sorts of groups that talk about a wide range of topics. Enter your keywords into LinkedIn, find the relevant groups, and be open-minded.
If you are able to do that, you will notice that LinkedIn features a lot of very knowledgeable people. These are people with a lot of experience on their belt. These are people who know certain niches like the back of their hands. You have to listen to these people because the things that are important to them, ultimately, will be important to the people in your niche.
Remember, as an online publisher (and that’s what a blogger ultimately is) you have to appeal to the tastes of your audience members. Unless you don’t want to make any money, your blog must cater to the needs of your viewers. That’s the bottom line. And you have to be aware of the questions that they have and you have to get the answers to user questions.
In other words, find the need and fill that need. I know it sounds simplistic, but it’s absolutely true. And this is how you can tell a blog that is going to be successful and make its owner a lot of money from a blog that is just going to gather digital dust.
Believe me, I’ve had more than my fair share of publishing blogs that nobody reads. The reason for that is because I would post topics that nobody cared about. I would spend a tremendous amount of time coming up with well-formatted, well-researched answers only to have very little to show for.
I don’t want that painful experience to happen to you. You have to first understand what your audience members are looking for and then you have to find the answers that they need.
Filling audience needs the right way
Now, it’s very tempting to just do the bare minimum to address the concerns and needs of your audience. Basically, you’ll just use random content. You’ll just find incomplete or even inaccurate material, and call it a day.
While you’re more than welcome to do that, believe me, the outcome is all too predictable. That’s right. Your blog will fail. Why?
That’s precisely what so many other bloggers are doing. They just phone it in. Seriously. They don’t even try. So they would publish plagiarized materials. They would copy and paste. They would pick stuff that they know is faulty.
It is no surprise that their audience members don’t reward them, assuming that they even develop an audience in the first place. Pretty sad, right? Well, let their mistakes be a lesson to you. Don’t do what they’re doing.
Instead, go to LinkedIn, ask questions that you know your audience members are thinking of, get credible answers, and publish these materials in your own words with the right citations. If you do this correctly, you start building a credible brand.
Branding is the name of the game
What if I told you that the blogging game has changed so dramatically that you really can’t afford to just screw around. Seriously. You can’t treat it like a hobby.
You can’t treat it like something that you just use to dump your thoughts on the internet. That’s not going to work anymore. It used to work 10 years ago, but it doesn’t work today.
You have to produce the right information right now to build credibility because that’s how you build a brand. You don’t build a brand by ignoring your audience. You need to write guest blog posts too. You don’t build a brand by giving them garbage. You build a brand by addressing their needs the right way the first time around.
It’s your call
Now that you know what you know, it’s your call. You have to use LinkedIn topics to deliver solid quality. Finding the right topics is not enough. You have to reposition these LinkedIn topics and reword them in such a way that your audience members would make the most sense of them.
At the end of the day, the blogging game is all about fulfilling a need. It’s all about your audience. If you’re able to wrap your mind around this, congratulations. You’re going to make a lot of money in the future. This is not a guess. This is not a conjecture. This is not a hypothesis. This is not an exaggeration. This is the absolute truth.
You know why? Very few bloggers actually care about their audience members. There, I said it. The cat is out of the bag. It’s all about money for them. Don’t be like them.
Find LinkedIn topics, milk as much info from them, present this information in such a way that your audience will appreciate, and you will make money. That’s the bottom line.