How to Blog all the Time [Wow! It’s Wednesday!]
Mar30

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How to Blog all the Time [Wow! It’s Wednesday!]

I’m often asked how I come up with new material for my daily blog posts. I can’t tell you how many emails I’ve gotten from FaN bloggers saying, “I have no idea what to write about this week. I don’t know how you do it.”

I’ll admit that for maybe the first year and a half of running Fierce and Nerdy, I would occasionally run into a wall, feeling like there was nothing left to say. The truth is that sometimes I kill myself over blog post and it not only doesn’t get any comments, but when I go to our stat counter, I can see that it barely made a blip on the radar. But then again, sometimes I kill myself over a post, and it gets a huge amounts of hits. Sometimes I dash off a trifle of a blog, and no one pays attention to it. But then sometimes I dash off a blog, and it becomes a huge hit. I’m still a little peeved my write up on when I should take my daughter to Disney Land which took me less than 15 minutes to write received more comments than any other post I wrote in 2010.

So my takeaway from all of this is that if it occurs to me to write about something, then I should just go ahead and write about it, b/c there is absolutely no way to predict what will be a hit post and what will not.

But back to how to come up with material every day. Here’s my method; it’s really simple: I keep a running list of blog topics on my iPhone.

That’s it. Every time I have a thought that engages me for more than a second or two I write it down on my topic list. The important thing is that I always write it down, even if I think it’s the most memorable idea ever and can’t possibly be forgotten, I write it down. And even if I think it’s the least important thought ever had by a human being on the face of this earth, I write it down. And then when it comes time to write the actual post, I pick my topic, depending on pretty much two factors: mood and time.

The reason I bring this up, is because this week and last I pulled two ideas off of my list that had been on there for a very long time: “My (perhaps unjustified) dislike of Gwyneth Paltrow” and “Food for which you accept no substitutes.” And they both made the Fierce and Nerdy top five. So it just goes to show, you never know what will resonate.

Hope that helps. I’m interested in hearing how other people come up with topics for their blog posts, too, so do sound off in the comments.

featured image credit: andrea joseph’s illustrations

shakespeare comic credit:  cambodia4kidsorg