Systems for Blogging Consistently

When it comes to blogging, everyone has ideas for how they can do better. When reading these tip lists they tend to focus on SEO, outreach, page set up, and a lot of the technical details of running a blog.

But if all of those strategies work then you’ll still be bringing leads and readers to a site that needs to have engaging and fun content. And if you want to be recognized as an expert, lots of content. So here are six ways to get more ideas for your blog so you can post fresh content more frequently:

1. Ask Questions

Talk to your family, friends, leads, colleagues, clients, advertisers, people at the bus stop. Everywhere you go when you talk about your business listen to the questions you get. And don’t just brush them off as ‘duh, only idiots don’t know that!’ Find out what questions come up for those who are not in your business 24/7 and then answer them with a blog post.

2. Give Interviews
We love HARO but the sheer number of daily emails and opportunities can be overwhelming. Instead of trying to reply to every inquiry every day that you have expertise in, give interviews on those subjects to your own site. Act as if you are the authority being featured and cover the subject.

3. Play “and then what?”
Many times we try to keep out blogs short and sweet to keep interest on the page. So read your old posts and ask yourself “and then what?” By following logically what comes next you have a new topic to write about.

4. Find a Theme
Whether you talk about your heroes, favorite lessons from TV shows, personal experiences, books you’ve read or TED talks you loved, find something that you can share 5-6 views on and turn it into a theme. You don’t need to have a book review every Friday or a quote of the week each week, but it’s nice to have those themes in rotation.

5. Answer the Search Question
It can be fun to see what search queries brought visitors to your blog. If they’re within your field then write answers to those questions as a blog post.

6. Do Your Googling
If you’re in a field, then you have to know what’s going on inside of it and get out of your little bubble. Set up Google Alerts for hot news items, read other blogs and news aggregates, and constantly be on the lookout for what competitors and colleagues are discussing. This is not to copy their blog postings but to get inspired. What questions are they getting? Do you disagree with an opinion? Is someone on the right track but missing an essential element? Each of these can become its own post and by linking back to the original content; you’ll also capture leads who are already looking for this information.

Even implementing just one of these strategies can help you get more blog ideas. Let’s do #3 right now for this post. And then what…

how do you capture ideas?
what’s the best way to organize blog ideas?
once you’ve got the idea, how do you write the post?
is SEO and all that tech stuff necessary? If so, when does it come in?

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