My 5 Favorite Unique B2B Blog Post Ideas

Everybody loves writing about fun things like music, movie reviews, explosions and ninjas, but many of us aren’t so lucky. For a lot of people, we get stuck writing posts for our company or clients that have no relation to anything that would appeal to the majority of the blog-reading audience of the world.

So, what do you do when instead of writing about nuclear arms races or Jedi mind tricks you have to come up with a year’s worth of posts about machinery gear design or crop-dusting techniques?

Keep in mind, I’m by no means saying these are “boring” or “uninteresting” topics. They are especially interesting to prospective industry buyers, but you probably aren’t going to get picked up by The Huffington Post anytime soon.

Here are some of my favorite ways to spice up those standard B2B business blog posts and maybe even get a couple extra pairs of interested eyes reading your stuff.

1. The Worst-Case Study

Here’s a twist on a classic blogging idea. We’ve all read case studies of companies knocking things out of the park and lighting the world in fire, but rarely do we get great crash and burn stories. We all love to see people do things well, but I’d wager that we like to see people drastically fail even more.

Sure, NASCAR can be interesting, but you get a good 23-car pile-up at 100 miles per hour and you’ve got yourself a viral video that even NASCAR haters will watch and share.

What’s a company you either respect or hate? Choose reasons why you either hate them or explain how your respect is waining because of something awful they did.

Cite examples of their terribleness and build a case study out of what NOT to do. You’ll be surprised how this little turn of idea can create a lot of buzz and interest a lot of industry readers.

2. The Beginners Guide To…

You know your industry very well. Your target markets probably do too. But what about those people just entering the market or those companies too lazy to create their own industry beginners’ guide.

Take your research and industry knowledge and put it to good use. Who knows, a major industry influencer may even link to it on their website as a training guide, giving you all those juicy backlinks.

3. The A-Z Guide To…

This is a simple twist on the previous one, but can be amazingly beneficial if you plan it out correctly. This can have the same type of information as the Beginners’ Guide, but it will be much longer and follow the alphabet.

The great thing about this idea is that it can easily be spread out into a series of posts and give you a month or more of great content to post. Then, once you’re done with the entire series, compile all the posts and format them into a nifty ebook that you give away on your site behind an email-gated landing page.

Bazinga! Now you’ve increased your email list.

4. Ask The Experts

This one can be approached in a few ways, but here are my two favorite. Chances are you know a lot of industry experts (or have clients that consider themselves industry experts that you can use to your advantage).

You can either reach out to 5-10 via email and ask a series of short answer questions that you go and compile into an “Industry Experts Talk About….” blog post; or, you could ask the same group of experts a series of longer-form answer questions and stockpile individual expert posts and release them systematically throughout the year.

Either way, you’re giving some love to clients who will in return link to the blog they are featured in and getting yourself sitting pretty on a good load of content.

5. Jargon, Demystified

All industries have technical jargon. Create a list of the most common technical jargon in your industry and write a post defining and explaining the origins and meanings behind those words and phrases.

This could also turn into a series of posts that you can give a clever name to and on the third Thursday of each month you post a “Jargon Watch” post and demystify another familiar phrase from your industry.

Things like this with a sense of regularity can easily build an audience of people who enjoy them and share them each time you post one.

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There you have it, my list of 5 go-to B2B blogging topics. Have you seen others that you really enjoy or have you used any yourself? I’m always up for adding new ones to my list.

Thoughts?