Step 3 : Blog Content Brainstorming

Face the fact – your blog needs to be regularly updated to maintain its readership! Hence,
you must always find fresh topics to write about, and we’re going to discuss how to do
just that in this step.
We have discussed how to write attractively, so now we are going to discuss what we are
going to write on. The very first option that I think a blogger should write on is a topic
that he or she feels passionate and interested in. You’ve chosen to make blogging your
career because you want to escape a mundane job – forcing yourself to write about
something that you’re not interested in is as torturous as as your mundane job!
The other reason I ask you to write about something you’re passionate about is because
your feelings and emotion shows through your writings! If you feel indifferent to a
certain subject but still write about it just for the sake of it, your readers will notice it.
Remember the advice about writing with a personality? Forcing yourself to write will not
establish a welcoming style at all.
Once you have chosen your main theme, start posting to your blog about it and make it a
habit to post at least once every day, even if it’s only a comment on the newspaper article
you read today. Think of yourself as a gigantic train. It takes a lot of effort to get you
moving. First, you might just budge an inch, and later trudge slowly on until you finally
reach your full speed. Then, it’ll take a lot of effort to stop you instead!
However, no matter how well you know your topic, your brain is bound to get exhausted
over some time, so here are methods to brainstorm for content for your blog.
1) The very best way to brainstorm is to see what other bloggers have to say about stuff
happening in your field of discussion. And the very best way to find related blogs is
to use http://blogsearch.google.com/ or www.technorati.com. There are other decent
search tools too, you just have to look around. From other blogs, you can gather more
knowledge on your subject and you can also comment on what others have to say on
your own blog!
2) Once you’ve established contacts with other bloggers in your field, you’ll have quite
an unexhaustible “conversation” ongoing, so you’ll not need to actively search for
content to write about. However, if you’re still stuck, search for news articles related
to your niche in the local newspaper or online through sites like
http://news.google.com and http://news.yahoo.com.
3) You can also have conversations with people with the same interest as you in the
particular niche you choose, so you will eventually build up a bank of questions and
answers and interesting discussions to write about in your blog. To do this, join
forums related to your niche, but don’t join every forum there is out there. Stick with
one or two with the biggest number of members or the one which is most focused on
your niche. This will also come in handy much later in gaining traffic and generating
profits.
Remember to keep up your momentum of posting at least once per day (or more if you
have a lot of content to write about) so that the major search engines will know that your
blog has fresh content everyday. This will attract the search engines to spider your page
on a more frequent basis, hence gaining you extra traffic.
Don’t worry about the paragraph above about generating traffic and search engines,
because we’re going to talk about that in more detail later. For now, remember to keep a
consistent effort everyday and build up momentum like that of a locomotive!