What Should I Blog About?

This site covers how to start a blog, build traffic and make money blogging. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Some days, blogging comes more easily than others. Maybe a news story sent your blood pressure spiking or something you read at another blog sparks your imagination. Those days you may find yourself updating once, twice or even posting a flurry of entries. You think to yourself, “Self, I’ve got this blogging thing down cold.”

Then the next day, nothing. You wake and find yourself staring at a blank field on your monitor and cannot, for the life of you, figure out something to write about. You know you need to blog. You need the ongoing traffic. You need to keep your readers coming back. You need something else besides one paid entry after another. But you don’t have a clue what you should write about.

How do you deal with those days?

Read a lot. Every day. Good blogging doesn’t happen in a vacuum. You need constant exposure to new information daily or you’ll quickly exhaust your brain’s supply of things to write about. Get into the habit of reading several news sources every morning, whether that’s by scanning sites like Google News or Yahoo! for headlines that capture your interest or making frequent use of your StumbleUpon button. The more information you’re exposed to, the more likely you’ll find something to say.

Keep a ‘linkdump’ in draft mode. At each of my blogs I have a linkdump entry saved in draft mode. There, I store links to sites, entries and articles that captured my interest but which I wasn’t quite yet ready to write about. When I find myself stumped, I browse through my linkdump entry and almost invariably find something that I’m either ready to share or which triggers another idea, and suddenly I’m off blogging merrily for the day. (Be sure to delete links in your linkdump once used, though.)

Have several unfinished entries in the hopper. Quite often, midway through writing the Great American Blog Entry, you realize that it’s just getting bogged down. Or maybe you lose interest. Or maybe you realize that it’s not so great after all. Don’t delete it! You’ve put time and effort into it, and time is money, my friends. Perhaps today isn’t the ideal day to write it, but who knows what tomorrow will bring? Save those kinds of entries in draft mode and come back to complete them another day.

Capture your thoughts on pen and paper. I’ll often find myself standing in line at the grocery store or waiting in the doctor’s office when inspiration strikes. Without a computer around, I can’t blog about those ideas. That’s where the little notepad and pen I keep in my purse come in handy. A few seconds jotting down a reminder when I’m not near a computer means that I don’t lose that idea — as is so often the case if I don’t write things down — and by the time I get home my subconscious brain has often half-written the entry for me. Yes, it’s old fashioned but that’s not always something to be ashamed about.

Call yourself. Don’t have a pen and paper handy but you do have your cell phone? Leave yourself a voice mail when some great idea pops into your head. Just be sure to pick up your voice mail! (Alternatively, you could consider using a service like Utterz which allows you to post audio entries directly to your blog.)

Keep a file. A paper one. I might as well confess: I’m a die hard magazine addict. There’s something about the feel of glossy paper under my fingertips that’s decadent, not to mention that magazines are more portable than my laptop. Many times I’ll find inspiration between the covers of this month’s Scientific American or or even Good Housekeeping (I do, after all, have several blogs covering varied topics), so I’ll rip the articles out and stash them in a file for future blog inspiration. This works particularly well if I happen to have Post-It notes around at the time so I can save my initial thoughts with the articles, too.

Join a meme. I kept this one for last because, truth is, I hate memes. Or, more accurately, I hate being tagged for memes. For those who struggle to find something to blog about, memes can be quite handy since they pose a list of questions that, presumably, you can easily respond to. Don’t know of any memes? No worries: there’s a site devoted to memes where you’re bound to find inspiration any day of the week.

Just blog already! Quite often when I’m asked by new bloggers “What should I blog about?” my response is simple: think less, blog more. In other words, if you simply sit down at your computer and begin typing — a practice known as freeform writing — you’ll often find your writing groove as the words begin to flow. Don’t think about it, don’t analyze it, just write an entry and save it in draft mode. Then step away from your computer a while before returning and editing the thing. Pretty soon you’ll be, as Darren puts it, thinking like a blogger.

Did I just tell you to edit — and doesn’t that involve actually thinking instead of writing? Why, yes. Yes, it does. But by that point you’ve already done the hard work: you’ve written an entry without thinking about it. Now all you need to do is clean it up and you, my friend, will have something ready to post.

UPDATE: For more ideas, see Raymond Loesch’s excellent article on Do you have blogger’s block?

Subscribe to Feed

---

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 at 1:19 pm and is filed under Writing Prompts. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

---

Tagged in: blog entry | blogs | traffic

More like this:

• None Found

2 Comments

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.