So What’s an Idea When It Comes To Blogging for Business?

“So what’s an idea?” asks friend and fellow writer Robby Slaughter in his newest book, “The Battle for Your Email Inbox”. “An idea,” he defines, “is information on which you can act.”

As a blogging trainer, I couldn’t help thinking that what Slaughter is saying about email should be a rule of thumb for us blog content writers.

“The reason to make a distinction that email is for ‘ideas’,” he points out, “is so that we do something with the information that comes to us through email, and also so that we direct others what to do with what we send them.” Email is for ideas, the author insists, not just random, context-free snippets of data. (My friend Robby might easily have been referring to blog content!)

We live in a world dominated by the buzzword “big data”, Slaughter observes. But while big data is crucial in solving crimes, fighting disease, or improving marketing, your inbox is not for big data.  Instead, it’s a router for ideas.

Blogging for business is about routing, too. After all, as a business blog content creator, you’re not in the business of information storage; you’re constantly collecting information, true, but the purpose is to route that information to potential buyers.

When Robby Slaughter talks about routing, he doesn’t mean sticking information in a folder never to be looked at again.  Routing, he says, means you send stuff to where it belongs, usually outside of the system in question. It’s all about getting freight out of the door.

That’s where, by the way, there really is one big difference between an inbox and a blog. “Old” blog posts don’t go out the door. Even if the information from those blog post is “routed” through Facebook or Twitter, the material remains in the “archives” of the website, organized in reverse chronological order.

That structural difference, though, doesn’t take away one iota from the value of the Slaughter definition of an idea as leading to an action. I’d say the ultimate challenge blog content writers face is getting readers to “see” themselves using the products and services described in the blog posts and then providing them with options for using the information we’ve provided.

So what’s an idea when it comes to blogging for business? A blog is a router towards action!