I love blog idea articles. Here’s one from guest author Christopher Wallace.
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Blogging can either be a pleasure or a chore. When you have plenty of interesting things to write about that flow effortlessly onto the screen, writing for your blog is fulfilling and worthwhile. On the other hand, ‘bloggers block’ can make posting feel like just another task.
Fortunately, a small amount of upfront organization can mean that you have a constant stream of ideas to choose from. Chances are, they’re already there — you’re just not making them available to yourself when you need them.
Imagine if every time you sat down to write, you had eight unique ideas to choose from. On any given day, at least one of those topics would likely stand out and inspire you. If that sounds desirable, here is a simple system any blogger can use to assure that their daily posts remain fresh and relevant to readers.
Establish a List of Topic Ideas
First, you need to create a document where you’ll store your potential ideas for posts. I recommend syncing this on the cloud with a service like Dropbox or Google Drive, so that you’ll have access to it from mobile devices wherever you are. I use a Google Doc, because the Drive app lets me edit it easily on the fly from my phone.
If you already have ideas for future posts, go ahead and add them. Your goal should be to reach eight potential topics before writing your next post.
Browse and Bookmark
Whenever I’m surfing the internet, I constantly find blog posts or stories that give me ideas for my own posts. Thanks to bookmark tools like Evernote and Pinterest, it’s easier than ever to make notes on the fly about these ideas. The advantage of Pinterest is that it’s simple to bookmark a page and access it anywhere, but your notes will need to be brief and they’re accessible to anyone following your page. Evernote is slightly more complicated to learn, but its tools allow you to privately bookmark a link from a phone, device or computer, as well as copying text from the post and adding your own notes. I keep an Evernote folder that’s always stuffed with great ‘starter ideas’ I can pull from to add topics to my running list.
Read Up On Your Contemporaries
To generate ideas for your own blog, it’s important to read what similar writers are saying about the topics you love. If you’re a social media blogger, for example, you’d want to frequently read both major sites like Mashable and smaller peer blogs. The ideas you find by reading other peoples’ posts will undoubtedly generate spinoff topics where you can expand upon a theme and offer your own original content.
Replenish
Here’s the trick — come up with new ideas for your blog after you’ve written your post for the day. If you go searching for blog ideas when it’s time to write, you limit yourself. It’s more likely that you’ll end up repeating someone else’s post idea without giving it your full potential for unique insight. By keeping a running topic list that you refill when you’re not desperate for a topic to write about NOW, you’ll give yourself time to develop your own ideas and write something truly original.
If you’ve ever scoured the web looking for a post idea to write about immediately, hopefully these suggestions resound with you. By working ahead and keeping an idea list on hand, it’s possible to always have fresh topics that have had time to develop in your mind to their fullest.
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Christopher Wallace is Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Amsterdam Printing, one of the nation’s largest providers of promotional products for businesses large and small. Amsterdam specializes in custom pens and other promotional items such as calendars, laptop bags and T-shirts. Christopher regularly contributes to Amsterdam Printing’s blog.