Probably my most valuable possession as a blogger is my idea notebook/journal. Because I maintain two blogs of my own and I write on a regular basis for a few other blogs, post ideas are priceless. Without a constant flow of ideas the results of my writing would suffer and my income would drop. I know just about every blogger out there faces the same issue of constantly pumping out ideas for new posts.
For me, the idea notebook is the cure to blogger’s block, and I know many other bloggers use the same approach, or at least a similar one. If you don’t already use a notebook or a journal to keep track of your ideas, I highly suggest that you start one as soon as you finish reading this post. If you do already keep a notebook, here are some keys that I have found for maximizing its effectiveness.
1 – Available When You Need It
The main reason for having an idea journal is to get your ideas on paper before you forget them. Most of us have plenty of ideas, they just don’t come at the most convenient times. With an idea journal you can write down your ideas as they come, and then when you have time to write you can refer to the journal for possible post ideas. If you just leave your journal next to your computer it will not be very effective.
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If you don’t know what creative writing is all about, or if you have an idea but would like to get started, you should check out our latest article on Daily Writing Tips, titled
Creative Writing 101. Here is a quote:
There is a common belief that because most of us are literate and fluent, there is no need to serve an apprenticeship if we want to become a successful wordsmith. … That’s what I thought until I tried to write my first novel. I soon learnt that a novel, like a piece of furniture, has its own set of requirements, laws of construction that have to be learnt. Just because I had read plenty of novels didn’t mean I could write one, any more than I could make a chair because I had sat on enough of them.
What does creative writing has to do with blogging? Well, for one thing all bloggers need to be able to write efficiently, and to be able to express and raise emotions from time to time. That is, they need to go beyond the mere facts once in a while (or more often than that depending on your niche). That is what creative writing is all about.
Partner:
MakeUseOf.com Amazing Websites and Tools you Never Knew About
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You might recall that Sheri McConnell
joined us a couple of weeks ago for our
Biz Growth Live call.
Last week she hosted a global event with her organisation
The National Association of Women Writers (NAWW).
If you are writing your business book or perhaps even a novel, I certainly recommend that you
head on over to the web page for the event, as by submitting your name and email address you will get FREE access to a 20 page workbook and audio’s of the seminars:
- Secrets to Getting Celebrity Endorsements: How To Get Fabulous Celebrity Endorsements for Your Business, Your Book and Your Products
- Standing Ovation: How to Own the Platform
- Hire Your Very Own Journal Keeper for Expanding Your Creative Voice
- Copyright And Your Creativity
- Creating Your Memoir
- Creativity on Call-Become a More Productive Writer.
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Let’s put this straight: having an opinion can be the secret sauce for a popular blog.
I am not saying that this is an essential factor. There are several styles that work online. Some of them are more neutral, where the author drops his personal views only occasionally, and overall he keeps a balanced tone and asks the perspective of other people often. That is more or less what Darren uses on
Problogger, and the one I aim to as well.
Having a clear and strong opinion about things, and expressing it on your blog, however, can be equally (if not more) effective for generating traffic and buzz. Yet very few people use this style. I wonder why.
Here are two examples that illustrate my point: Loren Feldman and Victor Franqui.
Loren Feldman is the guy behind
1938media, a video blog that cover all sorts of Web 2.0 topics, often in a satirical manner. Loren does not have a problem if he needs to kick things (to avoid saying something else) around. If he does not like something or someone, he will spill it out as raw as he can. Through out his videos he generates a great deal of controversy, and he might also gain some haters along the way, but as a result he is becoming one of the most popular video bloggers around the web.
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Many bloggers suffer from the daily grind of having to find new posts for their blog - but what if there was an easier way? What if your next post was right before you in the activities that you do each day?
One great way to find new content for your blog is to capture things that you do in your daily routine that relate to your topic and then to present them as a blog post.
This won’t relate to every blog topic but many of us are living lives that are a gold mine of content - we just need to learn to capture and repurpose it.
Let me give you five examples of how to capture and repurpose daily activities for blog content:
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This is a guest post by Jennifer Fulwiler.
For those of us who have diary-style blogs in which we offer readers a glimpse into our daily lives, there are times when we find that we have to write a long post in order to convey a story. However, it can be hard to find tips for creating long blog posts since a cardinal rule of writing for the web is to keep it short.
Web readers do occasionally read posts like this if they’re done well. I believe that the key to getting visitors to thoroughly read a long story is that it first must be scannable. When a reader comes across your blog and sees a long post she is going to take no more than a couple of seconds to ask herself, “Is it worth my time to read this?” Here’s how to show her that the answer is yes:
1. Start with a bang
Writing a story for the web is different than writing a story for print publication. Web readers have much shorter attention spans and will quickly move on if a post doesn’t immediately capture their attention. Before you go into any background details or set the stage for your story, begin with one or two bold, concise sentences that will grab readers’ attention.
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I was reading through an old notebook last week and came across a quote that leapt out from the page at me. It was partly because it was written in CAPITALS and had arrows pointing at it - but partly because of what it said.
“Probably the best place to start thinking about what your blog should be about is to consider what YOU are about.”
I’m not sure where I picked this one up. I actually think that it was a friend who doesn’t even blog who said it to me.
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In this post Abhijeet Mukherjee from Jeet Blog (where he writes about tech tweaks, blogging tips and productivity hacks) asks ‘do you write from the heart?’
As professional bloggers, freelancers or writers, sometimes we tend to be skeptical about our own content. We tend to think more about external aspects like marketing etc (which we can always do after we complete the article) even before we start writing and consequently the quality of the article dips down.
However most of us fail to understand that the questions which come to our mind, which bother us when we start writing, are completely unnecessary and doing no good to us. Do the following questions bother you?
1: Will readers like my post ?
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This is a guest post by Alan Johnson, the author of The Online Business Handbook.
One of the most common things bloggers complain about is their lack of ideas. You hear all about how excited they were during their first week as bloggers, only to realize that things stand quite a bit differently once they start losing momentum.
Is that the case as far as you are concerned, are you using lack of ideas as an excuse? Well, guess what: there is no such thing! Show me one person who says that he or she doesn’t have great ideas and I’ll show you a misguided individual.
Symptom, Not Disease
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40 Killer illustration designs for inspiration
we run into some cool portfolio on the web we found out some great illustration design, i mean u ll love these
