When you are busy writing 90+ posts per month as I am it is very easy to tap out of ideas a few times a month and scratch your head wondering “What should I write about now?”. This becomes even more common on the blogging schedule that I have where I write a weeks worth of posts at a time and have to come up with enough original and unique content to write around 10-14 articles in a single Sunday.
When I run out of ideas and inspiration doesn’t seem to be coming from within I turn to outside resources to help inspire or goad me into action. This will often come in the forms of catching up on the latest RSS feeds of the blogs that I follow to see if anyone wrote about something that I might be able to contribute to or share my own point of view on.
BlogEngage.com is one of my favorite sources to go to find what other bloggers in my community are talking about and I have found many a good post inspiration from browsing the posts submitted here.
Sometimes I will just simply scan news.google.com and look under the science and technology section for something newsworthy, but this isn’t always a good fit as I write seven days ahead of time and we all know that an article seven days later is already “old news”.
Blogsearch.google.com searching for WordPress, Technology or other keywords will help yield me something recent that I might find worth writing about. When I don’t find something I want to write about I use the time to read other blogs and leave comments to help keep my social presence and backlink building alive.
If all else fails then I just use stumbleupon to stumble across random websites, or Digg to find out some upcoming articles. And as a last resort I will just muck around on YouTube to find anything upcoming and interesting.
Between all of the above mentioned sources if I can’t find something to write about in fifteen to twenty minutes of surfing and scouring then I deem that I just have plain old writers block and call it quits from writing until another time.
Update:
@CIKMarketing also mentioned Google Trends as another way to find inspiration and material to potentially write about and this is another excellent idea.
What are some of your favorite tips for carving up ideas for blog posts?
-Dragon Blogger
