Starting and maintaining a successful blog takes time, persistence, and consistency. Finding your voice, building your audience, and updating your blog consistently don’t happen overnight. It’s the same story whether your blog covers cooking, photography, your hometown, silly stories, or your daily adventures.
No matter what type of blog you want to start or already maintain, you’re going to need to create content. And if you’re anything like me, maintaining a blog is a lot of fun until you realize that you need to keep writing. Consistently. And you need to comment on other blogs. Consistently. And you need to optimize your site and posts. Consistently.
What are you supposed to write about? Hasn’t everything that could be written about your niche already been written a million times? Maybe. But, you have a unique view to express. You have your stories and experiences and opinions to share with the world.
Easy in theory, but sometimes writer’s block gets the best of us. When you’ve gotta sit down and write about something – anything – and you don’t know where to start, here’s a list of strategies and ideas to get you thinking.
Think Outside the Box with Content Idea Generators
Originally covered in this post on the SEER Interactive blog, sometimes you just need to step back and consider some crazy post topics. These tools let you add a couple topics and will generate post titles. Guaranteed to get you to approach your topic differently!
Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator
Portent’s Content Idea Generator
Alexandra Franzen’s Fill-In-The-Blank Inspiration
On-The-Go Inspiration
Whenever I’m out and about, I’m struck by inspiration for a blog post, but when I get home I’m only struck by writer’s block. There are a number of ways to keep track of your on-the-go inspiration, but the most important step is to remember to do it! Here are some of the various tools I use to keep track of post inspiration when I’m out and about:
Notebooks, Phones, and Photos
I carry a small notebook with me in my purse or backpack. If I’m at work or out for coffee, it’s just a matter of grabbing my notebook and scrawling a couple words to jog my memory later.
If carrying a notebook isn’t your style, I’ve also started taking photos of places that I’d like to go back and visit again. If I need to take quick notes, I use a native notes app or Evernote.
When you need quick inspiration, a quick flip through your photos will remind you of what you did recently. Just don’t get sucked into a game of 2048 while you’re at it.
Keeping Track of Online Inspiration
There are countless ways to keep track of inspirational articles or tutorials. I’ve tried a number of different tools, but these are my three preferred tools:
Pocket – Instantly save articles to read later
Pinterest – Create a private or public board where you can save web pages that you’d like to revisit.
Create drafts – If there’s an article that I’d like to write a response to, I’ll usually create a draft post that includes a URL to the post.
When I don’t know what to write about, I’ll go back to my drafts, my Pinterest board, or Pocket to see if anything strikes my fancy.
Internet Sleuthing
If all else fails, I’ll browse the internet for inspiration. Often a dangerous tactic (I have a habit of falling into deep, deep internet rabbit holes), it’s best to approach this with a plan in mind.
Try your hand at internet stalking
Not really stalking, but a deep dive into what some of your blog idols are and have written about. What did your favorite blogger talk about when he or she had 10 readers? Do they have any post themes that inspire you? You could even just write about what you’ve learned from a particular blogger. Sarah von Bargen talks about sleuthing your way to blogging success.
What’s popular on social media?
If you have self control (I don’t), you can hop onto Twitter or Pinterest to see what others are posting for your relevant interests. If you’d like to filter out the distractions, BuzzSumo identifies that top-shared URLs across Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc for whatever topic you enter.
What do your readers want?
Depending on how many readers you have, you can dig into Google Analytics to see what the most popular posts are. This can help you determine what kinds of posts drive the most visitors. (Don’t have Google Analytics set up yet? Here’s a step-by-step guide.) You can also see what tags drove the most visitors or comments through your blog’s dashboard.
Bonus!
Creating a regular series is a popular and proven way to keep readers coming back. Here’s a great post from Sarah von Bargen about how her weekly Web Time Wasters column has boosted the success and readership of her site.
In the end, your commitment to logging your inspiration will make it easier when you actually sit down to write for your blog. This list of suggestions barely scratches the surface of all the different ways you can track blog post ideas. Do you use any tools that weren’t listed here?
