How to Generate Ideas for your Blog Posts

No doubt you have already chosen your topic around which to write your blog but now you’re left with the dilemma of what to write and how to present information to your readers.

Having found your blog, you really want to have enough quality, relevant content on there to encourage your readers to bookmark your site and come back time and time again.

You may have chosen a “hot topic” like health & fitness but what exactly will you write about this subject and what do you think your readers are going to find interesting?

Taking Health & Fitness as an example, will you start with a post about weight loss? Perhaps a post suggesting home fitness tips or healthy eating advice? You might even want to write some blog posts on vitamins and supplements.

To be honest, you’ll probably want to cover all of these subjects eventually but, taking one blog post at a time, you need to decide what information you want to share and what you think will be of most interest to your readers.

Here are some ways that everyone can use to generate ideas…

Search the internet

Naturally, the first place you will look for ideas will be the internet and the best places to start are internet forums.

A forum is basically a virtual meeting place for people with the same interest. Visitors to the forum can post messages and questions on the subject of that forum (in this case, health and fitness) and interact with other like-minded individuals.

You don’t have to actively participate in these forum discussions but you can see what everyone else is talking about and get familiar with the latest products in the marketplace. You can also see what advice is being given to people who have posted questions about specific issues on the subject, all of which you can use as ideas for content on your site/blog.

If you search for “Health and Fitness Forums” in Google, you will see 75M+ results. Take a look at some of the top ranking sites and you will see the breadth of information and ideas available to you.

Ask your friends

We all have opinions on certain subjects so ask for your friends about their opinions. What have they found has worked best for them in terms of weight loss, fitness programmes, supplements, etc?

Discuss the social and motivational issues associated with team sports vs individual pursuits. For example, do people find it beneficial to play team sports and are there issues with self-motivation when you are, say, going to the gym on your own.

Have your friends had specific health issues that have been helped or hindered by a particular exercise programme or regime?

Are there any positive or negative experiences with vitamins, supplements, weight gain/muscle building powders, ointments, pills and potions, etc, etc?

Use your own experiences

It depends upon the subject you choose to write about as to whether you have any related experiences but, using this example, it could be that you overcame an injury or coped with a condition by following a certain rehabilitation regime or routine.

Make a mindmap

Without going off too much on a tangent, a mind map is a great, pictorial way to represent ideas and concepts.

It is a visual thinking tool that helps you to structure information, helping you to analyze, comprehend, synthesize, recall and generate new ideas.

Ask your blog visitors

Conduct some analysis by interacting with your blog visitors. Anything you write as a result of this is guaranteed to be entirely relevant. Examples of what you could do are:

Take a poll.

Do a survey.

Ask them questions and encourage them to ask you questions.

Accumulate all of the information and feedback and you’ve got some great ideas from your visitors, for your visitors.

Read, read and read some more

Quite apart from the myriad of articles available online, try reading articles about any aspect of health and fitness in a newspaper or magazine?

What ideas did that give you?

Write the ideas down and file them away in your reference folder.

Even better, write the ideas down and file them away in your reference folder AND cut out the article and file it away for future use.

There is probably nothing in a library that you can’t see online but, if you find you can concentrate more easily, go ‘old school’ and spend a couple of hours with some books.

Always make a note of ideas as they occur to you

You could be walking the dog, travelling to work or sitting in the comfort of your own home and suddenly and idea for a blog post pops into your head.

Are you going to remember that idea or do you need to write it down?

I’d advise you to always carry a small pencil and paper with you, just for those situations. Then, when you get somewhere where you can add a few more notes, just spend a couple of minutes doing so.

Alternatively, make a note on your iPhone or PDA.

Of course, you don’t have to do all of these but using one or more of these ideas could help you with your thought processes. You’ll also find that one idea for a post can very easily lead to ideas for 3 or 4 other posts.

All will be relevant and all will prove interesting to your readers and encourage them to visit your site again and again.

By: Steve Peirce