How to come up with ideas for your blog posts
Written by Nico on November 29, 2008 – 2:14 pm -When writing a personal blog it’s usually quite easy to find subjects to write about. Things you’ve done that day or places you’ve been to are frequently encountered in personal blog posts. When writing for a niche blog, however, there’s a lot less to choose from, topic wise. Still, you have to come up with new posts frequently or your blog will quickly lose it’s subscribers. When just starting a blog you can probably think of tons of topics to write about, but as your blog grows, your pool of ideas shrinks.
Here are a few ideas to come up with new ideas for your blog posts.
Make a mind map
A mind map is a great tool to plot down your ideas. Start with a clean piece of paper and write the topic of your blog in the middle of it. Don’t write down a whole paragraph of text, pick the single most important word that describes the topic of your blog. Now think about subjects that relate to your blog, this would probably be the post categories already on your blog. Draw lines to connect each topic to the word in the center. Next you start splitting up each category into sub-categories. Each one could be the topic of a new blog post or be further split into new topics. You’ll be amazed at how fast you fill up the whole sheet of paper with ideas.
Look what others are writing
There are probably other blogs in the same niche. Have a look around and steal borrow ideas from them. An easy way to keep a tap on what other bloggers are writing is build right into every blog: rss feeds! Just add the rss feeds of every blog you can find in your niche, to your rss reader and you will always be up to date on what they are writing about. This also keeps you updated on industry news from your niche, that you might have missed otherwise.
Get away from it
Sometimes you just have to let it all go and do something completely different to get your creative juices flowing again. Get out, take your dog for a walk in the park, go for a bike ride, a subway ride to some random destination or whatever other activity you can think of, that does not require you to be near a computer screen. You can even take a piece of paper with you to work on that mind map.
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Tags: blogging ideas, Writing
Posted in Writing | 9 Comments »
December 1st, 2008 at 3:05 am
Also use longtail keywords as your title. This is sure to get you indexed fast if you have a new blog and you would be surprised what people are searching for
Kelly
December 1st, 2008 at 3:28 am
I agree, I have HitTail running on a few of my websites and I get traffic for some searches that I would never have thought of.
December 1st, 2008 at 12:31 pm
Try for very long tail keywords in hi tag as well that help
December 2nd, 2008 at 7:38 am
What do you mean by hi tag? Or are you referring to the header tags (i.e. h1, h2, h3… tags)
December 7th, 2008 at 10:23 am
Nice tips. Like Nico, I use HitTail to comb searches too. It’s always funning seeing some of the long tails that bring people to your site.
December 13th, 2008 at 9:26 pm
My ideas are overflowing that sometimes I don’t know where and how to start.
Sometimes I end up posting nothing at all.
December 17th, 2008 at 1:41 am
Yeah, sometime mind is boce blank, and don’t have any idea what I want to write.. Read other people blog sometimes give me some new idea to write something for my blog
December 19th, 2008 at 11:31 am
Mind maps work best for me for coming up with ideas. I generally like to start with paper and then move it to wordpress.
December 19th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
The great thing about mind maps is that you can work on them anywhere, anytime. Waiting for a train or bus, during lunch, dinner at the in-laws, literally anywhere!