free tips on seo and internet marketing

At some point in time you may find yourself struggling to come up with fresh material to blog about. Where do you draw inspiration from when this happens?

This article will provide you with several solutions to help you come up with new content for your blog.


1. Google Alerts
If you have an industry-specific blog, you might consider signing up for Google Alerts. Let’s say you have a blog dedicated to your love of ice cream and all of the wonderful flavors they have: mint chocolate chip, rocky road, french vanilla, mmmmmmm, cookies and cream, mmmmm (sorry, I digress). You can create Google alerts for the following phrases: “ice cream”, sorbet, “Ben and Jerry’s”, Breyers, “Haagen Daz”, etc. You then specify how often you would like to receive the alerts (once a day, as-it-happens, or once a week). Once a day or once a week is usually plenty! But if you need to be on the cutting edge, choose as-it-happens and any time that phrase is mentioned in a blog, forum, or news site, you will be sent an email with the details.

2. Regularly Scheduled Post
Create a regularly scheduled post. For example, our ice cream blog could have a “Flavorful Friday”. Every Friday our blogger could review a new flavor of ice cream, including pictures, nutritional info, viewer ratings, etc. This is content that the blogger can count on to blog about every Friday as long as they make the effort to do it. The ideas are there for the taking. This blog uses the same idea — every weekend Mark posts the “Links for the Weekend”. It’s easy and regular content.

3. Future Post
How many times have you had several great ideas for blog posts all in the same day and you decide not to write them up because you just finished posting? You think you need to save them for tomorrow or the next day? That isn’t the case! By tomorrow, you may have forgotten them! Enter future posts. What’s a future post you ask? It’s a post that you write just like any other post, but you schedule it’s release for a specified time in the future. It’s great to just sit down and write a few posts at the same time and not have to worry about blogging for a few days!

Future posts also work great when you’re going to take a vacation and you don’t want your blog to suffer while you’re away.

4. The Great Forums
I find forums such as SitePoint and DigitalPoint to be a great source of blogging material. Often times when I see a reoccurring question in a forum I treat that as a red flag. You know right then and there that people are interested in that topic. That’s gold! It doesn’t get any better as a blogger than to start a post that you know people want to read.

If you’re not a member of a forum I would encourage you to join one. It won’t take long before your find gold in them there forums.

5. The Blogs
Surely you do visit other blogs? And hopefully you don’t just take, but you give back, by being part of the community and commenting. Many of my posts start out as comments on other blogs.

I also find commenting to be a great way to keep my mind sharp and tuned to blogging. It may sound strange, but I’m willing to bet that the people who comment the most are also the people that write with greater frequency on their own blogs.

6. The Magazines
Magazines are also a great way to find interesting topics that you can then turn around and blog about. Just about every topic you can think of will have a magazine or periodical that covers it. I have subscriptions to four magazines: PC World, PC Magazine, PC Gamer and Search Marketing Standard. Magazines provide you with the opportunity to challenge something that was said or just report that so-and-so magazine had this to say on the topic.

7. Author Collaboration
Two heads are better than one so why not work with another author at times to cover a topic? I’ve found it very rewarding not only to ask for help at times, but also to bounce questions off someone else to see what they think on a issue or to see if they have anything to add. In fact this article itself is a collaboration! Proof that it works!

8. Guest Authors
Bringing in a guest author is truly a win-win situation. It allows you to have a break while also allowing the guest author a chance to gain new readership for their own blog. Remember that it’s common courtesy to include a bio of the guest author with a link to their blog at the end of their article.

We would love to hear what other people do to think of content when they are out of ideas!