When you’re designing a gift campaign, sometimes it helps to look at other campaigns from the perspective of a donor. See what makes the campaign appeal to you; suggest improvements; and discover whether the campaign actually prompts you to complete a giving transaction.
Let’s look at a campaign that caught my eye one Thanksgiving Day. In this campaign, led by a nonprofit organization, donors could purchase a particular gift to be given to a child or family living in poverty. The campaign focused on how a small purchase price could provide a gift with a much larger impact.
If you run a gift boutique, you may be wondering what kinds of things you can write about on your blog. It helps to put yourself in your customer’s shoes. What are they looking for?
Think of blog ideas that will help solve your customers’ gift-searching dilemmas. When you take that approach, you will come up with so many ideas you can’t wait to write.
E-books are useful for your business website. They’re great for giveaways, trust-building, and info guides for your visitors. But how can you write an e-book when you’re already busy running your business?
One of the simplest ways to write content for your e-book is to start with a top 10 list. Whatever topic you want to share, make a list of the top 10 things your visitors need to know about that topic. Write those 10 things down. For simplicity, I’m going to refer to those 10 things as your main topics.
Next, write five things people need to know about each of those 10 main topics. Don’t worry about full sentences yet. Just capture your ideas. What you have now is the outline for your e-book. Each of your 10 main topics is a chapter. Each of the five need-to-know ideas is a page. For simplicity, I’m going to call those five ideas your page topics.
With a few notes, you can be well on your way to writing your e-book content. Photo by Kelly Sikkema at Unsplash
Now that you’ve got those page topics written down under each main topic, I want you to focus on one page topic at a time. How can you help your reader understand that one page topic? Would you want to explain it? Give examples? Tell a story about it? Share wisdom? There’s no right or wrong answer. The question is how would you best explain it to someone sitting in front of you right now?
Go ahead and write (or record) what you would say. Keep going till you’ve given your reader the main takeaway for that particular idea. That’s a page of your e-book! Don’t edit yet; just get the content written down in whatever form it takes.
Repeat this process for each of your page topics. That will give you the content for your e-book. Now you can go through and lightly edit, tweaking anything that sounds awkward, filling in gaps, clarifying anything that might confuse your reader.
You’ve got it: the content for your e-book, ready to share.
As a business professional, you may be thinking about writing a book, but you aren’t sure where to start. What main topic should your book focus on? What would keep readers engaged? How can you narrow your vast experience into a single book?
Here’s a simple test for selecting your first book topic: Could you teach this topic in a one-hour webinar or workshop? If you can teach it, you likely have a viable book topic.
Ready to start your pet care business blog? Coming up with content can feel overwhelming, especially week after week. Let’s look at a simple way to get started by brainstorming.
When someone clicks on your website link and arrives at your homepage, they are still in scan mode. They are searching for the answer to one specific question. If they don’t find the answer quickly, they will move on to another website.
You might have heard the first step of writing a book is creating an outline. It’s true that an outline can be a big help in organizing a book. But it’s not necessarily the first step.
Some book topics lend themselves well to outlines, especially how-to books where the steps of a process are clear. But other topics might be more difficult to put into an outline up front. Some books are a process of discovery in the writing.
How can you create an outline up front if you don’t know yet what you’re going to write?
How do you take that journey of discovery as a writer that leads eventually to an outline?
Introducing the clothesline: a flexible, creative, discoverable approach that will eventually emerge into an outline for your book.
I’ve been asked how to write a short blog post to keep your business blog going when you’re crunched for time—as you might be now during the lead-up to Christmas. You can write a helpful, valuable, one-paragraph Q&A post answering a common client question. Lead with their question, as I did here. Then answer it quickly but helpfully, as you would if they were standing right in front of you. Pair it with a photo, and hit publish. Your blog will be active and visible, and clients will appreciate that one helpful tidbit you share. One paragraph is all it takes to answer a client question and share the answer with your current and future clients. Merry Christmas!
Have you thought about writing a book in the new year? Your 2025 experiences can be the basis of your new book. You’ve already lived it. Now you can write it.
January is just a few weeks away. Are you wondering what you’ll be writing about on your business blog in the new year? Take some time this week to pause and reflect on the past year. The questions people asked, the lessons you learned, the highlights, challenges, surprises, and wisdom you’ll carry into the new year, those are all potential blog topics.
Janet Eriksson 