There are torrents of ideas when you start a new blog and in fact you’ve got so much to write that you feel like publishing multiple posts in a single day. You have to forcibly stop yourself just to maintain a semblance of regularity. You start dreaming about featuring in the top 100 blogs of your niche and your traffic graph actually throws buckets full of encouraging numbers at you. It’s like a dream run.
And then you begin to wake up.
It’s not a sudden awakening. You toss and turn around, you try to keep the dream going. 5 posts a day get reduced to 2 or 3 and 2 or 3 get reduced to 1 and then, to your horror, you begin missing entire days. After sometime, it doesn’t even remain a horror, you have nothing new to write and you have lost enthusiasm. You wonder how come all those successful bloggers keep coming up with one killer post after another with phenomenal regularity and to add insult to the injury, they not only write great stuff for their own blogs, they also write awesome guest blog posts for other blogs. What are you missing?
First of all you have to realize that everybody runs out of topics, eventually, even the greatest of bloggers. So how do they get new topics? Here are a few things you can do to keep the streams of blogging ideas flowing:
Be a part of the community
When you work alone there is a far greater chance of you running out of blogging ideas. Visit other blogs in your niche and pay close attention to what people are talking about. You get lots of new ideas when you interact with people.
Give priority to building a community
It’s hard to run out of steam if you’ve got a vibrant community on your blog. It’s always very encouraging when people give feedback, whether positive or negative.
Encourage your visitors to ask questions
Once you’ve developed a community, encourage your visitors to post questions. If you write about a product or a service believe me, people will have unlimited queries, and every query can be turned into an engaging and useful blog post.
Get active on social media
Lots of interaction and stimulation takes place on websites like Twitter and Facebook. People are constantly posting interesting tidbits that can be easily turned into great blog posts. Even small exchanges can be transformed into full-blown blog posts with some effort.
Get ideas from your existing blog posts
Lots of sub-topics are hiding in your existing blog posts. Go through your old archives and try to revive your old blog posts with new perspective. A lot changes in a few months. You can also re-write your older posts with some new twists.
Add value to blog posts and articles appearing on other websites
Use websites like AllTop.com, Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon and PopURLs to find new content relevant to your field and see how you can derive new content out of them. Don’t worry about always writing longish blog posts. Even if you have one paragraph to add, link to the original content page and add your bit. This way it won’t seem daunting. Besides, sometimes when you think of publishing just a single paragraph, it’s easier to writing a long blog post.
Learn and share continuously
Learning doesn’t just help you blog non-stop, it also improves you as a professional, but that’s a different point. It’s great fun learning new things about your niche and them sharing them with your readers.
The key to NOT running out of blog post ideas is realizing that everybody does, and you constantly have to keep this in mind and plan accordingly. How do YOU make sure that you don’t run out of topics?
There is always something one can write about. I have about ten blogs and a couple of thousands articles as well as books I have written.
Go to Google keywords and write something about each keyword on the subject of your blog. That should keep anyone going for a few months!
I sometimes rewrite older posts and Find it a Great idea. I think also on days when you want to publish as you said 5 or 6 post one of them should be saved as a Draft for cases of Bloggers block.
It’s great to see you’ve put all the nice points together, I certainly agree those are some fine ideas to never run out of blog topics. Sometimes I think my biggest problem is not having enough time to accomplish all mentioned above while producing a well written post. A little greedy maybe? lol.. well, need to work smart. Still, enlighten by your post. Stumbled.
@wchingya
Social/Blogging Tracker
I think quoting a small portion of an interesting blog post you read and writing your response is a good way to generate content.
Another idea is to interview people on your blog. Ask someone if they are willing to answer 3-5 interview questions. It helps promote the person and generates content for you so it is a win win.
Great tips. I’ve found that some of my best blog posts are derived from comments I’ve left on other blogs. I think it’s something about feeling really inspired enough by what you’ve read to leave a comment. Generally that comment is going to be thoughtful and hopefully add something beneficial to the post. Thus giving you the framework for a post of your own relating to that particular topic in some way.
I sometimes rewrite older posts and Find it a Great idea. I think also on days when you want to publish as you said 5 or 6 post one of them should be saved as a Draft for cases of Bloggers block.