What to do when you don’t know what to blog about
A very insightful post was written today by Darren Rowse (if you are new to the world of blogging, I suggest you Google him) that deals with the subject of blogging when you can’t blog no more.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/plunkmasterknows/ / CC BY 2.0
All writers (bloggers included) deal with writer’s block. The truth is — even if you do have a lot to say you don’t always know exactly what it is you want to say, how to say it and where to start.
When I started my first blog ages age, writing one post per week was highly prolific for me. But as you can see from this blog, I now typically write one post per day. Oddly, writing 500-800 words per day for this blog (on top of writing for my personal blog, for class assignments and the university newspaper) doesn’t hassle me or cause me any distress. I simply sit down at the computer, search through a list of topics, pick one and start writing.
The list is something I add to everyday and sometimes contains URLs of other blog posts that I would like to emulate or share in my own words. Today’s topic (which was added to the list this morning) has the link to Rowse’s post beside it. It’s amazing what ideas you can find that are not exclusively your own but can be made your own after you’ve dwelt upon them and then written a word or two about them. Think about how many modern novels and films are based on Shakespeare’s poetry.
But back to the topic of the ProBlogger post (I know you’re thinking that was a very skillful transition there), Rowse makes the point that sometimes you just need to blog about the basics.
A friend of Rowses’, who was considered a “seasoned pro” in his field, started a blog about his line of work. The friend told Rowse that he ran out of things to blog about after just 10 posts. Despite being in the same field for 20 years, he could not think of anything more on that topic to blog about.
Rowse concluded that his friend was taking for granted the level of knowledge he actually had. Much of what the pro had learned was so basic that he “didn’t realize how valuable it was for someone at a lower level of experience.”
I think that analysis was dead-on. When considering a topic to blog about, I often don’t realize how much is actually behind that topic — how much of it I may know that others may not.
Take for example a simple topic (and I am taking on right from my list here) like getting traffic to your blog. How many posts could I get out of that if I really thought about it for a while?
Let’s see …
I could write about all of the different ways to get traffic to your blog with social sharing sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon and Reddit; I could also write about submitting articles to directories; I could write about optimizing your site for search engines, preparing landing pages, building backlinks — there’s so much! And even those methods I just mentioned have sub-topics that can potentially make up entire series of blog posts.
If you really stop and think about the topic or niche your blog centers around, you will realize that there is a lot more too it. Ebay began in 1995 as the pet project of some French-born Iranian programmer and has since grown as the most popular online market, largely due to the notion that one man’s junk is another man’s treasure. In the world of blogging, the junk pile of information that lies dormant in one man’s mind may very well be another man’s treasure.
Related: Check out my free blog topic generator for great ideas to blog about.
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