“5 Ways to Never Run Out of Blog Post Ideas” plus 1 more

5 Ways to Never Run Out of Blog Post Ideas

Posted: 28 Nov 2011 12:02 PM PST

This guest post is by Katy Farber of Non-Toxic Kids.

When I started Non-Toxic Kids four years ago, I had no idea I would never run out of things to write about. In all those four years of posting between three and seven times I week, I never struggled for more than a few minutes with a topic to post about.

Why?

Maybe it has to do with my tech-savvy mom who is constantly sending me interesting links to articles about current parenting and health issues. Seriously, how lucky am I?

But I'd like to think it has to do with the fact that I need to know about these topics. They are common sense issues and concerns that I face as a parent, and a human being on this planet.

I offer these ways to find continual and unending sources of blog material, and they are all right in front of you.

Write about what keeps you up at night

I call it the common-sense blogging approach. Just think about what matters to you. What can you not stop thinking about as you fall asleep, or worse, when you wake up in the middle of the night? I can't be the only one who does this. What are issues that your colleagues, or people in your blog niche, are worrying about right now?

For me, one topic lately is what mattress we should buy for my youngest. A conventional one, although cheaper, may contain harmful chemicals, but the safer ones are twice as much. I've put off this decision for years. Clearly, this would be a great topic to explore and write up as a post, or series of posts.

Find your flow

You may need to find your source for perpetual ideas. It's a different place for each of us, but we can all find it. For me it's running. Once my feet fall into that repetitive pattern, my mind lifts. The steady drumbeat of my heart, the calmness of being alone, the soft sounds of the woods slow my thinking. Sometimes it's only then I can access a place of creative ideas and problem solving.

I like to think of it as a river right above my head. Flowing in it is every place I've ever lived, my childhood, dreams, fears, loves and ideas, all flying around at electrifying speeds. If I don't grab ideas, pull them down into the here and now, and onto paper or the computer, they are gone until next time. Or some I might never find again.

That is where many of my ideas are born. On a long dirt road in Vermont, the idea for my blog was born this way (can you hear the song?).

Where is your flow? Whatever it is—sewing, walking, rocking in a hammock, gardening—find where your ideas live and grab them before they get away like birds scattering in the sky. Then grab your computer and write, bird by bird (to borrow an expression from one of my favorite authors, Annie Lemott).

What do you and your friends talk about?

Before I started blogging, I was constantly talking with my friends about parenting issues, and we eagerly shared ideas and troubling questions about the safety of products, and what we had success with. These early conversations and questions became the foundation of my blog, Non-Toxic Kids. I was doing the research anyway, in trying to find out what was healthy for my infant daughter. All it meant was getting these ideas into posts and sharing them with other parents in my blog.

So consider, what topics do you discuss regularly with your friends? What do you need to know about, or want to know the opinions of others you trust? This is gold blog post material, and it is usually right in front of you.

What makes your blood boil?

There are some topics that outrage us into action. Some of my best posts were written after I learned about a new piece of legislation, action, or inaction, about an environmental issue. These posts usually do well sitting at least over night—or even for a few hours—for a re-read.

Posts written hastily in anger can have troubling effects but a post written from the heart about a current issue can make a difference and strike a chord with people. Here is one example of that; it's a post I wrote after President Obama told the EPA to withhold new ozone (smog) air quality standards that would have saved thousands of lives. It felt good to put that negative energy into something that could make a difference.

Write about how you wish the world to be

This is a bit harder, especially in our current economic and political climate. But we have to as Gandhi said, "Be the change we wish to see in the world." Write about your dreams. What do you see as how we can solve our most vexxing problems? What do you want to see in terms of our environment, local communities, human communication, education, etc.?

Write about it. Describe your vision. We need to hear from each other about how we might solve the complex problems facing the world. Take on any issue, and describe the change you dream of seeing in your lifetime. Or describe a small moment in your life that showcased how this change is possible. This is beautiful, optimistic blog material.

These are our ever-flowing sources of blogging material, because we are all constantly exploring what it means to be alive in this world, how we can live better, and help others and ourselves more fully.

How do you generate your blog post ideas? Please share these in the comments. I look forward to reading your thoughts.

Katy Farber blogs at Non-Toxic Kids. She's a teacher, author, and blogger who just released a new ebook, Eat Non-Toxic: A manual for busy parents and is the author of two education books, Why Great Teachers Quit and Change the World with Service Learning.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

5 Ways to Never Run Out of Blog Post Ideas

Why I Wrote the Kind of Book I Hate

Posted: 28 Nov 2011 06:07 AM PST

This guest post is by Danny Iny of Firepole Marketing.

We all have pet peeves. Things that annoy us. Products that we would never spend money on. And things that we swear we'll never do ourselves.

But sometimes, fate turns the tables on us. That's what happened to me, and that's why I ended up writing the kind of book that I usually hate.

Image copyright moshimochi - Fotolia.com

It's all because of Derek Halpern. And Ana Hoffman, and Corbett Barr, and Brian Clark. Here's what happened.

Building an engaged audience, from scratch

I've dabbled in the online world for a few years now, but my current blog is less than a year old.

Just like everyone else, we started with nothing—no traffic, no subscribers, and no followers. We had no post history, no comments, and no search traffic.

We had to build an engaged audience, from scratch.

But we didn't know how, so we tried things. We ran PPC ads, but it was too expensive, and the traffic didn't stick. We tried SEO, but that was taking too long to get results. We started tweeting, but nobody was really listening.

We were basically trying to learn by trial and error, and while that can lead to some really great and robust learning, it also takes waaaaay too much time for you to be able to build a business around it.

Then I realized something: I could outsource the trial and error!

Outsourcing to the world's top audience-builders

When I say the word "outsourcing", you usually think of people working for very low wages in developing countries.

You think about tasks that require a lot of repetition and systematization, like data entry, backlink building, and other dull and tedious tasks that we don't want to do ourselves.

That isn't the outsourcing that I'm talking about.

No, what I had in mind was a lot bigger.

I was going to outsource to the very best audience-builders in the world. They've already done the trial and error, right? I just needed to find out what they had learned.

I made a list of the top blogs that I read, and the top audience builders that I follow. Some were huge, established names, like Guy Kawasaki and Brian Clark, and others were much earlier in their audience-building, but were clearly bringing something special and unique to the table; people like Jk Allen and Stuart Mills.

I read what they wrote, and I watched what they did. I listened to their podcasts, attended their webinars, and took careful notes along the way.

Pretty soon, some patterns began to emerge…

Patterns of audience-building

The patterns that I started noticing were pretty simple. Here's what most successful audience builders do:

Have a clearly defined objective.
Write great content.
Put it on sites that people are actually looking at.
Stay focused.
Gather and share information that your audience wants.
Build relationships.
Express gratitude.

Simple enough, right?

Well, I wrote all those posts (which were all published here at problogger.net) while putting the same best practices to work for our blog, and the results were spectacular.

In less than a year, our traffic and subscriber counts have grown by several orders of magnitude, and today I'm recognized in much of the blogosphere as the Freddy Krueger of Blogging.

Something was still bothering me, though…

What about the other ways?

While observing what the audience-building superstars were doing, I didn't just notice the patterns—I also noticed what seemed to be exceptions to the patterns.

There were lots of very successful audience-builders who did things very, very differently, and it worked for them.

So … was I doing things wrong? No. I was getting great results, so of course I wasn't doing things wrong.

Then … were *they* doing things wrong? No, they're getting great results, too.

So what was going on?

No one right way to build an audience

That's when I really understood what I had already been told so many different times:

There is no one right way of building an audience.

There are lots of ways, and mileage will vary depending on your circumstances, experience, background, and personality. What worked for one audience-builder won't work for another, and what worked for me might not work for you.

So, how do you know what to do? I mean, if you're reading this, then you're probably trying to build your own audience, and you want to know how to go about doing it. Am I saying that I can't tell you, because even if it did, it wouldn't help?

No, that's not what I'm saying at all.

The patterns that are right for you

When I was watching all of those audience builders, I didn't just notice the patterns of what was working—I noticed the patterns of what would work for me.

You could watch the same people do the same things, and notice different patterns—the patterns that will be right for you.

Why?

Because that's what our brains are wired to do—notice the things that are relevant to us, and filter out the rest. But in order to do all that, first you need to see enough people doing enough things to actually notice the patterns.

That's when I realized that I was going to write a book. And not just any book. This was going to be the kind of book that I hate.

The kind of book I hate

We all have books that like more, and like less. Some people like reading about philosophical discourse, some people like popular science, and some people like post-apocalyptic serialized fiction.

Personally, I like the kind of popular science or business book that delves deep into something and draws insightful conclusions. Some of the authors on my list of favorites include Malcolm Gladwell, Chip and Dan Heath, Steven Pinker, Clay Shirky, Marcus Buckingham, Dan Ariely, and others.

Their books are fascinating, and they all run hundreds of dense pages of thorough analysis and conceptual exploration.

None of them write books that are collections of articles or perspectives by various authors. I usually hate that kind of book; I find that they don't get into any real depth, and you end up with a couple dozen articles all telling you more or less the same thing.

But I wanted to write a book that would give people the road map that they need to build their own engaged audiences. And to create this road map, I knew that I would need a lot of guides to point the way.

So I reached out to all the audience-building superstars that I had followed, and I asked them one simple question:

"If you had to build an engaged audience from scratch, how would you do it?"

It took a bit of time, but then the answers started rolling in. They were rich, and thorough, and many of them surprised me. They were even more diverse than I thought they would be, and every single one of their perspectives was useful and valuable.

The ironic thing is that I usually can't stand this kind of book, but in this case, I think it's the best book I could give to anyone who is looking to build an audience. The coolest part is that it isn't even all that self-congratulatory of me to say so, because even though I "wrote" it, only about 10% of the 239 pages of great ideas were written by me!

But enough about the book. What's the lesson here for you? Actually, there are two of them.

Lesson #1: One peak, many paths

The first lesson is the lesson that I learned when I set out to write the book, which is that there are many paths up the mountain, and many ways of reaching the peak.

This lesson comes with good news, and bad news.

The good news is that just because someone built their audience in a certain way doesn't that you have to do the same; there are lots of other ways up the mountain, which means that you never run out of options. As long as you're committed, and keep on exploring, you'll find a way.

The bad news is that there isn't any step-by-step plan that you can follow verbatim to get really great results; the bad ones just won't work, and the good ones will have to be modified to fit your skills and situation.

The only way to find your own path is to study the paths that so many others have taken, and then chart your own course.

Lesson #2: Sometimes what we hate isn't so bad

The second lesson is that you shouldn't make blanket statements about not liking something, because every situation is different.

I don't like reality TV, unless it happens to be about martial arts. My wife doesn't like eggplant, unless it is pureed and cooked. And I don't like books that are collections of articles, unless it's the best way to share all this information about how to build an audience.

So don't get too rigid about what you like and what you don't—instead, think about what will work best to help you achieve your goals. And then go do it!

Danny Iny (@DannyIny) is an author, strategist, serial entrepreneur, expert marketer, and the Freddy Krueger of Blogging. Together with Guy Kawasaki, Brian Clark and Mitch Joel, he wrote the book on how to build an engaged audience from scratch.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Why I Wrote the Kind of Book I Hate