When you get started on your blog you are excited and you likely have a large number of writing ideas. But after a few weeks or months your idea list may start to empty. The trick is to constantly be adding blog ideas. But how? You need something that I call “blogging focus.”
Focus is defined on dictionary.com as “a central point, as of attraction, attention, or activity”. So I define blogging focus as keeping your attention on your blog or more specifically always keeping your blog in the back of your mind. Now, obviously when you are reading industry publications or attending conferences this is fertile ground for generating new writing ideas. But ideas can be found almost anywhere. When you are reading your morning newspaper, watching a movie, having dinner in a restaurant, listening to the radio, or attending a party you can be on the lookout for new ideas.
Ideas are Everywhere
Now, I don’t mean that you should always be thinking about work, it is more of a mindset of awareness. Let me give you an example of what I mean. My old company, Lightning Labels, has a blog dedicated to label printing, a pretty narrow focus. But after writing for a while I found that ideas were everywhere. One day my wife bought some new saucepans and she was having a heck of a time removing the barcode labels before using them. There was a blog post idea. Another time, we ordered a nice bottle of wine when we were out for dinner one night and the bottle came with this really unique label – there was another blog post idea.
Blogging focus is about being on the lookout for ideas. This does take a bit of practice, but after a while (around 4-6 months) I found that it came naturally and was really no work at all. The key is, if you enjoy writing your blog you will find blogging focus easy. If you don’t enjoy it my advice to you is find someone who does either inside or outside your organization.
Whatever your topic, when you get in the habit of passively looking for ideas you will find that they can appear in all kinds of places. There are other ways to actively generate new ideas, I will explore that in my next post.
Photo courtesy of ihtatho
