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Day 3 - Blog Content Brainstorming

Face the fact - your blog needs to be regularly updated to maintain its readership. Thus, you must always find fresh topics to write about, and we’re going to discuss how to do just that in this lesson.

We have discussed how to write attractively, so now we are going to discuss what we are going to write on. The very first option that a blogger should write on is a topic that he or she feels passionate about and interested in. You may hope to make blogging your career because you want to escape a mundane job - forcing yourself to write about something that you’re not interested in is as torturous as as your mundane job!

The other reason it’s important to write about something you’re passionate about is because your attitudes and emotions will show through your writing. If you feel indifferent to a certain subject but still write about it just for the sake of it, your readers will notice it. Remember the advice about writing with a personality? Forcing yourself to write will not establish a welcoming style at all.

Once you have chosen your main theme, start posting to your blog about it and make it a habit to post at least once every day, even if it’s only to comment on or to syndicate another marketer’s article (related to your topic). Think of yourself as a gigantic train. It takes a lot of effort to get you moving. First, you might just budge an inch, and later trudge slowly on until you finally reach your full speed. Then, it’ll take a lot of effort to stop you instead. The important thing is that you take action every single day, even if it’s just a small step. Keep the train going!

However, no matter how well you know your topic, you may run out of fresh ideas over time, so here are methods to brainstorm for content for your blog.

1. The very best way to brainstorm is to see what other bloggers have to say about what’s happening in your chosen field of discussion, or ‘niche’. And the very best way to find related blogs is to use http://blogsearch.google.com/ or www.technorati.com. There are other decent search tools too, you just have to look around. From other blogs, you can gather more knowledge on your subject and you can also comment on what others have to say on your own blog!

2. Once you’ve established contacts with other bloggers in your field, you’ll have quite an unexhaustible “conversation” ongoing, so you’ll not need to actively search for content to write about. However, if you still feel stuck, search for news articles related to your niche in the local newspaper or online through sites like http://news.google.com and http://news.yahoo.com.

3. You can also have conversations with people who share your interest in the particular niche you have chosen, so you will eventually build up a bank of questions and answers and interesting discussions to write about in your blog. To do this, join forums related to your niche, but don’t join every forum there is out there. Stick with one or two with the biggest number of members or the one which is most focused on your niche. This will also come in handy much later in gaining traffic and generating profits.

Remember to keep up your momentum of posting at least once per day (or more if you have a lot of content to write about) so that the major search engines will know that your blog has fresh content everyday. This will attract the search engines to spider your page on a more frequent basis, hence gaining you extra traffic.

Don’t be concerned at this point about generating traffic and search engines, because we’re going to talk about that in more detail later. For now, remember to keep a consistent effort everyday and keep that momentum going!

»» Day 4: On Page Search Engine Optimization (SEO)