All bloggers experience some degree of writer’s block from time to time. It ain’t easy coming up with something new every single day. It can be anything from a serious case of the blahs which keeps you from posting at all, to a mild feeling of “Oh crap, what can I possibly write about today” which leaves you fumbling around, posting irrelevant stuff, recycling memes or, in a panic, posting about what you bought at the store that day. Ugh.

Blog writing is like all professional writing. To do it effectively, you must plan ahead. I can hear a lot of you saying already, “But I’m not a professional. This is just a fun hobby for me.” If you want readers beyond your family and personal friends, you must approach it like a professional. There are millions of blogs out there. Good writing and fresh ideas are the difference between gaining a subscriber, and someone just moving on.

One thing I will say… planning ahead is much easier to do for a blog like this than for my humor blog , because humor requires some degree of spontenaity, at least in my case. However, I do have some tips for that type of blog too, so never fear!

So, how can you keep fresh ideas coming?

1. Read other blogs in your genre. This keeps you current and lets you know what others are talking about. But a word of warning here: There is a danger of just recycling other’s ideas, or hashing over something that has been done and redone, so when you read others blogs, do it with a mind to sparking your imagination, not to just copying what has already been said. Unoriginal thought drives readers away. And when I say “other blogs”, I should say “A Huge-Lotta Other Blogs“. Don’t confine yourself to the 10 people on your own blogroll. Be constantly on the lookout for new faces and new sources.
2. Subscribe to a list of news sources that suit your niche so you can have a constant flow of new ideas coming into your inbox/reader/etc. For example I subscribe to News of the Weird , Offbeat News, CNN’s Offbeat section, and quite a few others. I may or may not directly quote one of the articles, but my Bitter Women blog is based mostly around “people are so strange” type of commentaries, or just laughing at the world in general. So news sources that provide that type of material keep the juices flowing! For this blog, I keep in touch with online media, technology trends (such as what’s new with Google, etc), online marketing, etc. Again I may not quote them directly, but I often find something that sparks my interest. When I do, I save it to my favourites list, or star it in my Google Reader. So on days when I am not feeling inspired, I have a folder to go through of ideas.
3. Google Trends - I use this sometimes if I want to see what people out there across the internet are writing about. You don’t want to just be a follower, however, if you see what people are talking about right now, you can often avoid tromping through overused ideas that have been written about time and again for years.
4. Keep a notebook by your keyboard, and even carry it with you. I sometimes come up with the best ideas when I’m not sitting here trying. And often real-life conversations with other people inspire me more than what I can read online. But like dreams, inspiration can fade until I’m left feeling, “I had a great idea yesterday, but I can’t remember what it was!” (I hate it when that happens.)
5. Google Blogsearch - This tool can be used both for finding new blog posts on any topic, therefore leading you to new sources of ideas/friends, but it can also help show you if an idea you do have is overdone. I think any topic can be done well and provide new insight, but you cannot know if you’re putting a new slant on things if you don’t know what’s already been done.
6. Ideas from outside the blogosphere. This is important to staying fresh. For example, if you blog about blogging, then take ideas from websites about writing or marketing or internet trends that don’t have a direct link to blogs. If you blog about celebrities, look at fashion trends, hot vacation spots, multi-million dollar homes, etc, so that you aren’t just spitting out the same old Britney news and showing the exact same YouTube footage as everyone else. Sure, blog about the topical stuff, but if your blog is just a clone of a thousand others, why should people subscribe to YOU instead of someone else?
7. User comments/questions both on your blog AND on related blogs can be a great source of ideas!

These are the ideas that keep me going every day… I hope they help you too! If you have some of your own, let me know and I’ll post them!

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