The 13 Business Blogging Master Post Templates You Can Use, Part 5 – Current Events, News & Opinion

How would you like to have endless new post topics, guaranteed? If you work current events and news into your blogging, it’s like getting free post ideas every week. Creating posts based on current events and news tells your audience:

• You’re up-to-date and current. Your content is not old and stale.
• You know what’s important to share with your people. Out of all the noise and news, you show that you care by being an expert curator of the relevant.
• You’re not just “phoning it in” with a ton of prewritten stuff set to automatically publish (not that there’s anything wrong with scheduled content, of course, but you want to mix in the current stuff to show people that “somebody’s home”).

How to Stay Updated

In order to be the best possible curator, you’ve got to be able to manage a lot of incoming news and information. I know most people have no idea what RSS is or what a reader is. That’s why I emphasize email list subscriptions on Remarkablogger instead of RSS subscriptions.

By the way, RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication and as the word syndicate suggests, it’s a technology protocol for sending information from a source to a multiple receivers. In other words, syndication. In this case, the receiver is a special software application called a reader. A reader can run on your computer or over the web. You subscribe to a feed and then that content appears in your reader. Think of it this way: websites come to you instead of you going to them.

But as an authority on business blogging, I need special tools to manage the firehose blast of information published every minute of the day. So I use Google Reader and subscribe to 105 feeds. If I only check them once a day, I will have well over 500 (usually more like over 750) articles in my reader.

Certainly I don’t read ‘em all. I blast through looking only at the headlines. As an aside, pause for just a moment and think about what I just wrote. Think about what that means. If a headline is lame and doesn’t immediately grab me by the eyeballs, it gets passed over in a split second, as fast as I can read it and have a reaction to it (or lack thereof). In other words, headlines are super-important. I can power through hundreds of articles in a short while.

When I find something interesting I take a look at it. Within seconds I know if it’s worth sharing with my people or not. If it is, I use the reader’s built-in social media sharing capability or, if I’ve opened it in its own page (instead of reading it in the reader), then I’ll use the HootSuite broswer addon to share it. Or I’ll bookmark it for inclusion in my weekly Link Journeys post.

Juxtaposition, not Regurgitation

Simply regurgitating news, no matter how relevant, usually isn’t good enough (don’t get me wrong–sometimes that’s exactly what’s called for, but often we can more of an impact than repeating allows for.

How?

Juxtapositioning something attention-getting with a practical lesson. Oh, by the way, if you just thought this was gonna be about just putting some kind of “spin” on a piece of news, think again.

One of the best ways to do a post like this is with the “What X can teach you about Y.” On Remarkablogger, I’ve done this with both Britney Spears and Lady Gaga. The trick for this is you have to do it when your “juxtaposition” is on everyone’s mind in the news. When I wrote about what Britney Spears can teach you about blogging, it was when she got a bit wack and shaved her head. Everybody was talking about it, so naturally the post got some attention. When I wrote 8 Monster Lessons Lady Gaga can Teach You about Marketing, it was during the Grammys when she appeared carried in a litter that looked like a giant translucent egg and everyone was talking about her.

This is using current events as a “hook” to grab your readers’ attention. Juxtaposition: it works.

When it Comes to News & Opinion, it’s the Opinion Part that Matters

Anyone can just regurgitate the news. Big fucking deal. I can set up an RSS feed aggregator to do that automatically. So. What. Nobody. Cares.

What matters is what you think about the news.

Or, more specifically, what matters is when you tell your people what this news means to them and what they should do about it.

That’s the important part.

Challenge Accepted

Can you find a way to create a post based on current events or news? Of course you can. Give it a shot and link to it in the comments. Share your efforts with everyone and get some traffic!

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Image attribution: ElvertBarnes