I love using this technique because as a busy mother of four children now, I do not have the luxery of writer’s block. When I have a chance to sit down at the computer, I need to be be able to sit down and WRITE. By having some post and article ideas at the ready, I am able to prevent a LOT of wasted time.
In fact, I’ve written about brainstorming blog post ideas in the past, and include printable worksheets in my ebook to help you do this for yourself.
I like the technique Darren recommends in 31 Days to Build a Better Blog (affiliate link) too, because using previous posts to spark new post ideas keeps your blog full of useful, in-depth information. Write out the titles of the last five blog posts/articles you wrote. For more ideas, go back ten posts (I personally tend to brainstorm as many ideas as possible in one setting).
Now take the first post and look for other article ideas. Did one of the subheadings or paragraphs feel like you could say a lot more about it? I’ve personally taken a subheading out of the middle of a published post and turned it into the title of a new post because there’s so much more to cover!
Did a commenter ask a question? Make a good point that you left out? Seem confused about a certain point? That’s a post! Jot down the title or topic idea of a new post.
Is there a pro to that con? Opposite point of view to explore? Does it need further explaining or a step-by-step how-to? Can you expand on a list you posted? (For example – if you wrote Ten Ways to Increase Blog Traffic and one tip was “Write a Guest Post” you could write a new post about how to guest post effectively. If you did that for each of the ten tips, you will have ten new posts without a lot of extra effort.)
If your blog is new and you don’t have any posts yet, create your blog categories and use your categories to brainstorm post ideas. See how I did this with my pregnancy and birth blog, The Birth Renaissance by brainstorming several article ideas in each category.
Challenge – Create a list of AT LEAST ten new article ideas. Spend a minimum of 15 minutes brainstorming article ideas based on your recent previous posts or blog categories.
Spent almost an hour doing this challenge. Instead of choosing the 5 most recent posts, I looked for 5 articles in categories on my blog that don’t have many articles. After brainstorming using the mind mapping method, and I came up with over 30 ideas! The next step will be to take these and put them into a schedule!
I love this idea. I try to jot down ideas that I come across during the course of the average day, so I don’t forget them when the comes to look for a topic. But it seems so much more efficient to me to sit down for 15-20 minutes (or an hour or whatever it takes) and let my mind wander down different pathways. I just tried this idea for the first time about a week ago. I’m not too good at actually sticking to a calender, but the list of post topics that results from this mind mapping method gives me topics to write on for quite a while.
This was easier than I expected! My blog is new so there aren’t many posts yet but looking at what I have got gave me ideas for 10 new posts in about as many minutes.