Let’s face it: most people will take inspiration from online sources to fuel their next blog post ideas. After all, search engines such as Google make it very easy to find specific content. While that’s fine for the majority, it doesn’t always work for everyone.
There are many offline sources of information, statistics, and data that you won’t find by doing a quick Google search. Yet, those sources can potentially be a goldmine of information for your blog! So, how do you find, manage & use offline blog post ideas?
Step 1: Finding Offline Content
To begin your quest for using offline content as the source of inspiration for your future blog posts, you must first find it! The trouble is, where do you start looking? And what exactly are you looking for?
First of all, you should remember the main sources of offline content. They can roughly get categorized as follows:
- Newspapers
- Magazines
- Brochures
- Trade journals
- Key people in your industry
The first four categories are straightforward because you may already get that content delivered to you in paper format. If not, you’ll likely find copies of relevant newspapers, magazines, and trade journals in your local library.
With brochures, you’ve no doubt accumulated an array of them over time and perhaps receive them regularly if you’re on a mailing list. But, what about key people in your industry? Those folks will have plenty of stories to share, many of which will be relevant to your blog.
You could interview those people, either in-person or you could supply a list of questions for them to answer via email.
Step 2: Managing Offline Content Ideas
Once you’ve collated an array of offline content idea sources, you’ll need some easy way of managing that information. The last thing you want to do is end up with piles of periodicals on your desk. With that in mind, what should you do?
The answer is simple: scan the relevant content in each source, and make it easily accessible. Document management software such as that from sites like https://www.filecenterdms.com/ makes it easy to index and categorize each offline source.
Once you’ve got those sources in a digital format, you can recycle the paper content. Plus, you’ve now got an easy way to refer to those sources for future blog post ideas!
Step 3: Using Those Offline Content Ideas
Having all kinds of relevant and useful data at your fingertips is brilliant. However, you need to consider how you’re going to use that content for your blog posts. Thankfully, there are many ways that you can use that content for inspiration.
For example, you could create a white paper showcasing a variety of case studies. Take a look at this post from https://venngage.com/ to see how you can make an attention-grabbing white paper using data from your offline sources.
Another way to use your offline content is by adding snippets of industry statistics in your posts. Doing so gives your content more weight because you can back-up what you’re saying with cold, hard facts. Hopefully, this article has given you some inspiration for your future blog post ideas. Thanks for reading!
