PureBlogging

Constantly coming up with new ideas for posts is one of the biggest challenges for most bloggers. For this reason many bloggers wind up regurgitating the same content over and over again. On the other hand, those that are able to consistently develop new, creative and unique ideas for posts will be well on their way to achieving success as a blogger. Quality of content is obviously critical to blogging success, and having original ideas to write about is equally critical to creating quality content.

The struggle for new ideas is something that I face on a regular basis. In addition to maintaining my own blog, I write for several others each week, so I can never have too many good ideas for posts. One method that I have used recently has been especially helpful, and it can work for any blogger regardless of the industry or niche.

If you’re like most bloggers you keep tabs of your favorite blogs through an RSS reader just about every day. Other blog posts are frequently used as a source of new ideas, but I try to stay away from this as much as possible because it can obviously affect the originality of your posts, plus it puts you in the habit of relying on others for ideas rather than using other methods to generate your own. Although I try to avoid getting ideas from the subject of their blog posts, I’ve recently used post titles to help come up with ideas.

Many effective blog post titles could easily be changed or converted to apply to a completely different subject, and I have found this to be a good spark for new idea generation and brainstorming. I’m going to go through a sample process with some headlines that have come through my feed reader this week.

First of all, I use Google Reader, which has a “star” feature that allows you to tag specific posts that you want to store for the future. By clicking on the star, you will be able to find that post again by going into the folder of your starred posts. Quite simple, but very handy for this process. Whenever I come across a post title that catches my interest and may be usable to me, I’ll star it. Then when I have some time to work on post ideas I’ll go to my starred folder and ther are several great post titles waiting to help me out.

Ok, so let’s take a look at some titles that I’ve found this week and see how they can help. For the purposes of this exercise I’m going to come up with some sample post ideas using the titles of the posts that are featured. Since it’s Super Bowl week I think I’ll use the subject of football for this experiment. If you don’t like American football, I’m sorry, you don’t know what you’re missing. The idea of the exercise, however, is to show that you can do this with any subject that you write about.

First, Shana Albert recently wrote 26 Reasons Why I Love Twitter - Plus 27 More Just in Case. This is a type of post title that can easily be adapted. If I were looking for some post ideas about football, I could contemplate the following article ideas:

• 15 reasons why Bill Belichick is the most annoying coach in the NFL.
• 10 reasons Notre Dame will still suck next year.
• 5 reasons why Brett Favre will play another season and 2 reasons it will take him 6 months to decide.
• 3 reasons Eli Manning will never be Peyton.
• 3 reasons the Dolphins should trade the #1 pick and 1 reason why they won’t.

Daniel Scocco wrote a “how to” article at Daily Blog Tips, How to Write Scannable Content. Of course, “how to” articles are nothing new, but they can be extremely effective, and they can be adapted to any topic. Here are some examples:

• How to beat your friends at fantasy football every season.
• How to take half a second off your 40 yard dash time.
• How to find tickets for any sold out football game.
• How to properly execute a screen pass.

Copyblogger recently published an article titled A Three-Step Approach to Strategic Content Development. If you’re looking for titles to work off of, Copyblogger is probably the best source you will find. For this example, I could work on the following ideas:

• A three-step approach to getting noticed by college recruiters.
• A seven-step approach to more effective off-season training.
• Five steps to beating the New England Patriots.
• Three steps to handling the ball in bad weather conditions.
• Fixing the BCS in 4 Simple Steps.

Dustin Brewer published The Best Free Web Development Add-Ons for IE6 and 7. From this example, the following ideas are possible:

• The best source of free scores and updates on your mobile phone.
• The best free telecasts for watching football online.
• The 3 best sources of free football news.
• The best places to find free football wallpaper for your computer.

Keep in mind that the idea is simply to get some ideas flowing. These titles would most likely not be the titles of finished projects as they would probably need to be refined to be more effective. Also, many of them may not be good ideas for posts, but they will hopefully get your mind rolling and lead to better ideas. With this approach you can easily find a few sample titles and quickly fill a sheet with ideas for new posts.