How to Come Up with Blog Post Ideas

Social Media Web Sites: Social media web sites are a great place to come up with new blog post ideas since what’s popular is usually very interesting! You could spend hours and hours trolling sites like digg.com and del.icio.us for new content – but I prefer sites like popurls.com that aggregate the top stories from all the social media outlets, in addition to video and traditional news sources.

RSS Readers: If you subscribe to a hundred of your favorite feeds in Google Reader or bloglines.com – then it’s not hard to get post ideas in a jiffy each and every day.
Groups: I haven’t used newsgroups in years, but something that’s still alive are the email based “list” type groups. The major ones are at Google Groups, and Yahoo Groups. Just search for a group with a topic or interest you might like, such as gardening, jokes, crafts, auto repair, etc. Sign up for the group, and once you start getting posts you’ll start getting ideas!

Magazines and Catalogs: I get a lot of post ideas from snail mail believe it or not. I have blogs in topics I have interests in like technology, gadgets, and music. I get catalogs and magazines in the mail like guitar magazines, CompUSA catalogs, and even newspaper ads from Best Buy and Radio Shack. If something catches my eye – I blog about it. I purposely sign up for free catalogs in the same interests as my blogs to have a constant stream of potential ideas. I stack them up at the edge of my desk and go through them whenever I need to.

Ask for Guest Posters: Some of the most successful blogs are run and owned by multiple authors. If you are in need of new ideas and quality content, why not solicit guest authors? Add a form to your site and specifically ask for new ideas and guest posters. You could even contact your favorite blog authors and outright ask them to guest post on your site!

Automating the Blogging Process
I am a HUGE procrastinator, and I’m easily distracted and I have really, REALLY bad Attention Deficit Disorder, and I’m a bit Obsessive Compulsive as well. Automating some of the blogging process has really helped me to make sure that I get some work done in an organized fashion each and every day.
Datafeedr: Datafeedr is a both an affiliate service and WordPress plugin you can purchase to create affiliate stores in WordPress. I write about this in great detail in my article series “How to Create an Affiliate Store in WordPress“. One of the features I love in datafeedr is “product dripping”. When you create an affiliate store with hundreds of products you an create posts automatically each day and have them auto-publish or “drip” to the homepage. This forces me to go back each day and re-write the dripped posts with better titles and some original content every day – and is a great way to jumpstart blog posting. Read more about product dripping here.

Write Multiple Posts and Schedule Days in Advance: Not a day goes by that I don’t get some sort of blog post idea. Once you get in the habit of writing these down, you’ll also start writing draft posts days ahead. This can be as simple as just writing a title and a sentence or two and saving the post as a draft, or actually writing multiple posts (alone or in a series) days ahead and scheduling them to post automatically in the future. The new scheduling feature of WordPress is awesome!

Automatically Schedule and Reuse Old Posts: I’ve written about this before, but the Scheduled Post Plugin by Dagon Design is one of my favorites! Basically it takes the oldest post in your blog and changes the timestamp to today and rotates it to the top spot on your homepage! On my blogs where I have hundreds of posts (especially the ones I don’t write a lot for anymore) – I rotate the posts and recycle them. This also forces me to check them out on a daily basis and make sure that they aren’t outdated and don’t need rewriting. This works especially well on sites that have content like jokes, recipes, or content that never really gets old. It also gives me a second chance to look them over and make sure there isn’t a new or better way to re-monetize them. This helps me to reuse all my old content AND keep the old posts fresh, clean – AND making money!

John Pratt writes about making money with WordPress, his latest series is about building a WordPress Affiliate Store. When he’s not online he can usually be found looking for a new Used Cell Phone.
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What makes a blog post interesting? Why do some blog posts attract hundreds of comments while others get not even a single one? What makes a reader share a blog post he just read by tweeting it on Twitter or posting it on his Facebook wall? What makes a blog post go viral on social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit or StumbleUpon? These are questions that most bloggers, especially the new ones, ask themselves regularly. Unfortunately, there is no definite answer to any of these questions. What works for a certain blogger may not work for another blogger. However, there are those strategies and techniques that may not work for all bloggers but work for a majority of them. Here below are tips on blogging – how to write interesting blog posts that attract readers.

1)      Write snappy and attention-grabbing headlines. You need to understand that there are probably thousands of other bloggers out there who are writing on the same topic as you are. So if you don’t make your blog posts stand out, they will get lost in the thousands of other blog posts written by your competitors. Turn this situation into an advantage by writing post titles and headlines that grab the reader’s attention.

2)      Write in a simple and understandable manner. Unless you are writing for an online literary journal, there is no need for you to write like you are William Shakespeare. Sure people will appreciate your literary skills but most people online are not looking for literary pieces. They are looking for informative articles that can solve their problems.

3)      Write less. The attention span of online readers is very short. Everybody knows this fact. People get bored easily online. And what makes them get more bored than a blog post that goes forever to read. If you can get a point across in two or three sentences, why go for ten sentences. The general rule is make your blog posts short and straight to the point. Don’t go around the bush because if you do, your readers will leave and go look for other bloggers who don’t go around the bush with their posts.

Just follow the above tips on blogging – how to write interesting blog posts. Your readers will appreciate more what you write and post.

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