10 Ways To Find Material To Blog About

If you are a blogger, there probably comes a time when you hit the wall and run out of things to say. This can be especially true if you blog 5 days a week or more. In this post, we will look at ways to find fresh blogging material week after week, year after year.



Here are two other resources that may help you as well:



1. Take a look at my blog post entitled, 6 Ways To Cure Blogger Writer's Block, to give you more ideas on blogging material.



2. Mark your calendar for tomorrow, Tuesday, October 19th. I will be a guest on the Blog Talk Radio program, "The Publishing Insiders." The show will focus on "Blogging Ideas the Whole Year Through."



Now, here are some ideas on where you can go to find bogging material year round:

Breaking News- Keep up with current events in your industry. As a blogger, you are in a great position not only report news to your readers, but to comment on it as well.



Google Alerts- There are a lot of people blogging on topics you blog about as well. By setting up Google alerts with highly relevant keywords, Google will let you know when someone else is mentioning your topic. That will give you a chance to see what he or she is saying and give you ideas that flow from those posts.



Books, Conferences, and Seminars- While you don't want to plagiarize someone's work, these sources of information will lead to a wealth of ideas to blog on. Whether you roll the information out as a review or whether you use the information yourself and then share your experience with your readers, you will find ample ideas to keep you busy writing for a long time.



Listen To Your Readers- By following reader comments on your blog, or e-mails sent to you by readers, you will find questions that you inspire from your blogging posts. These reader questions are fertile material for new posts and are probably the most relevant material you can post on.



Interviews- Interviewing an expert in your field is a great way to find material for your blog. Most experts will love to sit down for an interview and it will not only lead to material for that post, but rich material for future posts.



Carnivals- Carnivals are posts that lists links to other posts on a subject. On this blog, I do a carnival every Friday I call, Marketing Tips Around The Net. Each week, I list 10 posts that catches my eye that week and share them with my readers.



Make Lists- People love to scan lists. 6 ways to... 8 steps for better..., etc). By collecting and sharing ideas in the form of lists, you have a great way to catch the attention of readers. In my experience, listing the actual number in the blog title almost always pulls in more readers than blog titles without numbers. I have even rewritten posts titles to include lists and have seen increased attention to the blog post.



Case Studies- Case studies can be wonderful material for a blog. By breaking down the merits of an event and looking at the steps the person has taken to roll out their event, you can highlight the pros and cons of their execution. If you do this in a productive way, then you will have valuable information to share with your readers.



Complain/Praise- There are a plethora of ideas here. Whether it's Google, Twitter, Firefox or any other technology that your readers find relevant, you can easily find material to last a lifetime by praising or complaining about things.



Define- In our ever-changing world, you can be a champion of your readers by defining buzz words for them. What is web 2.0, geotargeting, or a niche? Whatever the buzz words are in your industry, you will find plenty of words to fuel many posts.


These are just a few ideas that I hope will have you blogging long into the future. For a more intimate discussion of blogging ideas, make sure you join us tomorrow night on the Blog Talk Radio program, "The Publishing Insiders." The show will focus on "Blogging Ideas the Whole Year Through."