If you have an established company blog, you probably have writer’s block from time to time. Today I want to share my favorite way to brainstorm new topics for your company blog.

If you’re using Google Analytics to track your web site traffic (and your blog traffic), you probably are aware that you can see what phrases people type in search engines to find your web site. This report can be found under Traffic Sources and is called Keywords.

To find great blog topic ideas, click on the Keywords report and show 500 results. Scroll to the bottom and look through the list. You’ll often find that people find your blog using phrases that are related to your blog or services, but you may not have written about these topics in your blog.

For example, one person found my blog in the last 30 days by typing in “landing page success rate.” I’ve touched on landing pages before, but never the concept of how to measure a landing page’s success rate. That’s a good candidate for a blog post.

Keep in mind that this trick works best with established blogs that receive decent traffic from search engines. Also note that if you’re not using Google Analytics, Hittail is another free service that can easily be installed on your blog to get keyword data.

Should a small business blog? That’s the question that Bill Slawski, Director of Search Marketing at KeyRelevance, Inc., has answered in a blog post over at Search Engine Land. On all points, Slawski hits the nail on the head. The many benefits of writing a small business blog are covered in Bill’s post, and I highly suggest reading it.

My experience with blogging has been extremely positive. I’ve maintained this blog since April 2005, and other than word-of-mouth advertising, I get more work from this blog than any other source.

By writing a blog, companies can communicate their experience in a practical and helpful way. They are able to share what they do with prospective clients in a way that goes beyond buzzword-laden marketing copy. If you’re thinking of starting a small business blog, I highly suggest reading Slawski’s article.

Looking for a good read on marketing? Ad Age has just the thing for you — its Power 150 media and marketing blogs. Included in the list are some of the more popular blogs (and personal favorites) like Duct Tape Marketing, the SEOmoz blog and GrokDotCom. Our friends at RKG even cracked the list with their blog.

Here are some others that I follow, and while these aren’t on the list, they should be because of the quality of the information they provide:

• Campaign Monitor Blog: This marketing blog primarily features e-mail marketing tips.
• Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog: Ecommerce blog covering usability, design and marketing.
• MarketingVOX: How did they miss this one? Features the latest online marketing news.
• Marketing Experiments blog: A more quantitative look at online marketing.
• Smiley Cat: Christian Watson’s Web Design Blog: Discusses topics in web design.

A recent article in PC World suggests that up to 80% of blogs contain offensive content. While the article discusses spam in the context of corporate internet browsing and reading offensive posts at work, a real issue for business bloggers is preventing spam on their corporate blogs.

If you have a blog, you’re probably aware of the attempts of spammers to place their content on your blog by submitting comments on different blog posts. They aren’t shy about submitting long, blatantly obvious spam comments. Case in point – since I enabled comments on my blog in late December 2006, spammers have attempted to submit almost 10,000 spam-ridden comments to my blog.

Of course, I don’t want these to appear in the blog, so I use the Akismet plugin for Wordpress to filter these out automatically. I moderate all comments that get past Akismet, allowing me to approve and display only those comments that are not spammy in nature.

If you have a corporate blog that isn’t protected by some sort of spam prevention method, your blog is probably already overrun with spam. Installing a spam filter can help you filter out comment spam and restore the true content of your blog.

So why should you block spam in your blog?

• Corporate firewalls and computer software often block sites with profanity and objectionable content. By filtering out comment spam, and by writing in a professional, business-like tone, you will ensure that your web site is accessible to a wide audience.
• Poor writing and comment spam make your blog look unprofessional. Stay on topic, keep content relevant and use professional language. Don’t make your readers wade through objectionable content to read comments from real readers.

Stuntdubl has a mention today of a great article on how to launch a blog. The article lists 21 tips for launching a successful blog and is a great primer for new bloggers. Lots of companies launch blogs thinking that it will instantly get them ranked highly on search engines, but this article brings to light the work required to run a successful blog.

My best advice for budding bloggers is to pick a topic you’re passionate about and just write. Offer good, authoritative content that others find useful. If your content is good enough, others will find you.

Count yet another large corporation among the blogging ranks. Dell launched its business blog in early July, and it’s an interesting case study in how businesses should/should not blog.

Thumbs up to the Dell design team for the blog. It is well-structured and has some features that readers will frequently use on the blog sidebar. Readers can see most viewed posts, posts with the most comments and a suggestion box feature. It also includes blog staples like categories, an archive and a blogroll.

The most impressive feature is the suggestion box. Clicking this link reveals a link that allows you, the reader, to suggest a topic. Many business bloggers suffer from writer’s block, and what’s a better way to get ideas for content than to ask your reader?

On the flip side, the contributors to the blog don’t do the best job of relating to the customer. Read the Dell and The Better Business Bureau post from the VP of Corporate Communications, and you’ll read just that — corporate communications.

Dell really opens itself up to criticism when its Director of Global eCommerce blogs about the new homepage. You’re certainly going to get negative feedback when you ask the blogosphere open-ended questions like “So, tell me, what you think of the home page of Dell.com?” If the Director would have instead posted to the blog that he was looking for some Dell customers to answer some basic questions about the new homepage design and allowed them to contact him, he would have gotten better results. He could then have posted the outcome of that exercise in a more brand-friendly way.

An early post to the blog entitled “Real People are Here and We’re Listening” directly reacts to what other bloggers had said about the Dell blog. As a customer, this probably isn’t helpful to you or something you want to read. As a reader, you expect real people to be listening, so Dell doesn’t need to come out and tell you that. Instead, Dell would have been better-served to read other bloggers’ reactions and make improvements. As the content improves, readers will know you are listening.

Dell has also done some video blogging as evidenced by the Dell Store Opens its Doors in Dallas post, which features a Sales Director at Dell talking about a new mall store in Dallas. While I applaud Dell for video blogging and testing that technology, the content of this video was only mildly interesting to those in the Dallas area. Viewers had to endure the dialog about how the store is “an extension of the direct model” and other jargon-filled conversation. A tour of the store would have been nice, but without the sales pitches and business jargon.

My advice to Dell? Use the blog as a channel for feedback — but not the only source of feedback. Be very careful of your tone and the content of the blog in general. Customers don’t want to hear business jargon like the first three paragraphs of the “Dell and The Better Business Bureau” post — they want to hear how to use Dell products to enhance their computing experiences. Offer the customers ways to use their Dell products in ways they hadn’t thought of and include some how-to advice.