5 Easy Ways to Write Content For Your Blog
August 12, 2009 | All Things WordPress, Blog Tips & Tricks 2 Comments
Have you ever found yourself stuck on what to write for your blog or someone else’s blog for that matter? That’s a challenge I face all the time and it’s the reason why I do not post more often. And it’s because I honestly do not have a plan of action on what I want to write about.
So I have come up with some tips that I think will help you and me get past the “writer’s block” and have a plan of action AND a blog post schedule that will put you on the right track to becoming a successful blogger.
- Create a topic series or a tip series and schedule the posts on a daily basis or a weekly basis. For one topic, you could interview other experts in your industry and get some really good content to post.
- Create and send out a survey to your industry and see what kind of topics of interest your audience would like to hear more about. This could be a goldmine for you! I recommend SurveyMonkey to create and distribute your survey.
- Repurpose your old newsletter articles or reports you have written in the past. They make for great blog articles!
- If you are an avid Twitter user, round up your best “tweets” and formulate blog articles from those. You would be surprised what you wrote a week ago could be your best article yet!
- Devise a simple blog posting calendar in Outlook or Google and set reminders so you can remember that you have a blog article due.
Lastly, if you do not already use WordPress for your blog (and/or website), consider switching to their platform. I am a huge advocate of the WP product and I will be offering training to those interested in learning the system from top to bottom. If this is something that interests you, email me at aletha(at)wordpresstowebsite(dot)com and I will inform you of the training dates when they become available.
Yelena on October 20, 2009 at 8:04 pm says...
You are right – having a plan of action and a posting schedule will help with the writer’s block (or rather, blogger’s block). But there are other benefits as well – writing that is more focused, consistent, on-message and also less time-consuming. Developing a blog editorial calendar requires a bit of an upfront investment of time, but it’s worth it.
The process is really straight-forward:
1. Decide on posting frequency
2. Select a few post types and formats to use (i.e. lists, reviews, how-to, Q&A, interview, videos, etc)
3. Use whatever format you find most convenient (Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar, Excel table, good old weekly planner) to write ideas for the next month’s (or two) blog posts.
I recently wrote a post about how to build a blueprint for a successful business blog – http://oneclickva.com/blueprint-for-business-blog/. It talks a bit about editorial calendar as well as about a couple other planning tools.
Aletha McManama on October 21, 2009 at 5:25 am says...
You have a great point, Yelena, on how you should make your message consistent and focused. I see a number of blogs that have no real purpose or direction in the articles that are posted on them. And thanks for sharing your blog blueprint article. Very insightful!