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Have you ever had one of those days? It’s sunny outside. The wind is blowing a gentle breeze. You can envision yourself on a cool patio lazing in a hammock, whilst sipping a cool beverage. Life is calm. The reality is you’re sitting in an overheated home, with no cool drink of preference in sight. You have deadlines to meet, AND you’re stumped for a blog post idea.  Earnest H. - illustration in ink ~~ © Patricia Pinsk How to quickly generate blog ideas so you can just get on with it One of my tricks is a keep a “blog idea” document. Whenever my brain starts to chug as far as brilliant ideas go, I crack it open to see if anything inspires me. Or I simply start to write. Many times I find, much like creating artwork, if you just start writing without edits, you can actually get the creative process going. And isn’t that what is all about? You just need to relax your mind, stop thinking, and let the words spew out. Many times the result is pure crap; many times it’s something close to brilliant. Usually it’s somewhere in between, and edits are required. There are many techniques you can use to ensure you never run out of ideas. As noted in How to generate a year’s worth of blog post ideas, you need to use social media. It’s a great way to find out what people are asking and talking about. With software such as Sendible, Tweetdeck or Hootsuite, you can specify keywords or topics that you want to follow. Listen to targeted “conversations”. This makes it easy to determine popular topics to write about – and ones your audience will likely read. As mentioned in a previous blog post Words, words, words…, you can also cheat and use generators to come up with blog post topics. One of the better generators out there is ContentIdeator. I used this title and idea generator to come up with the snappy title for this blog post. I chose this title over the ones found at Tweak your Biz - which also had some great suggestions. “Learn to blog like Hemingway” was my favorite, but perhaps less appropriate in this case. Good luck with the blogging. You don’t need to follow these suggestions in any given order. If going for a drink first works for you, make like Hemmingway. Just remember to follow his wise words “write drunk, edit sober". If you liked this blog post, you may also like: |