Finding Inspiration For Blog Posts & Articles
Sometimes you may feel like the fountain of ideas has dried up and although necessity is the mother invention, said phrase may well not ring quite true. So How do you keep ideas fresh and in line with what people want? How do you even go about finding ideas to form posts from?
Use Analytics
Well ideas can easily come from less than conventional places. I personally tend to draw on daily goings on and experience, but if I hit a real barrier the single place that never fails me are the web logs from any single web site I run. Dipping into the Keyphrase report in Google Analytics, either looking day-on-day or week-by-week will pull up any number of possibilities.
By way of example, articles about topics such as recovering accidentally deleted files in OSX, might through Google produce hits on such keyphrases as “recover deleted emails in osx”, which, without much need for deduction, would lead you to the idea of writing an article on recovering emails within pop and imap accounts, as well as from backups from your webhost.
The great advantage of this method is that it keeps your posts on topic, and although it might sound like a lot of repetition, if you are targeting a core audience, for example mac users, or authors, or musicians, then it makes a lot of sense.
Give Away Freebies
If push comes to shove and you still can’t come up with something, then think a little about charity and consider who you can help others by producing some kind of freebie, be it a cheat sheet or free designs and code that you can throw like food to a starving crowd. It is nearly Christmas after all!
Free grub is always good marketing fodder. It gets free links, plenty of good will and the opportunity to potentially spread your name to a much wider audience. Hoovering up lists of other peoples freebies and giving a compendium blog post on, for example, 100 great free Photoshop brushes, is also another idea that is frequently used by popular design blogs.
Mailing Lists & Aggregators
Another less conventional sources for me include a mailing list that I am on. Its based out of San Francisco, which is odd, given that I am in the UK, but they talk about all manner of topics from the technological to the political and on to the down right bawdy. This is, on occassion, a good dipping well for ideas and topics which are either current, or of interest, because people are looking for answers, and so, in writing a blog post, on topic, you are helping others, by proxy.
Another source would be to visit news aggregation sites that are pertinent to your topic. Don’t simply lift, rip, or plagiarize as some do, but use the content for inspiration. Draw parallels and create related articles that will be of use to others.
Get Writing!
And so, there you have it. Three good ideas for adding content to the web, your blog, and to help the internet become a single blog post more useful place.
