One of the hardest parts of starting a new blog and keeping it going is finding ideas for the content. Since you want to post at least couple of times a week (and some people recommend daily posting), then you need to have a steady flow of inspiration.

In the early stages of planning a blog, I find it helpful to write down everything I can think of to do with the topic or topics I plan to cover. Then I leave that list for a while, then go back to it to see what else occurs to me. However, there are also many other ways to research and find ideas for blog posts. What you use will depend on your aim for the blog.

The Aim Of Your Blog

One possible aim for your blog is to rank well in the search engines. If that’s the case, then search engine optimization will be your main goal. In order to write posts that will get attention from the search engines, you need to find out what the trending and high value keywords are.

There are several tools you can use to do this kind of research for free, including the SEO Book keyword suggestion tool, Keyword Discovery, WordTracker Keyword Questions, SEM Rush and the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. (You can find out more about these tools in our recent post on Five Free Keyword Research Tools For Bloggers.)

When you find the hot keywords write them down and see what post ideas they spark. See if any of your original post ideas can be tweaked to use these keywords. Although you are writing for SEO purposes, remember that you are also writing for people, so don’t overuse the keywords and use some variations to make your posts reader-friendly.

Getting The Buzz

Some people don’t really care about SEO but want to get people talking and connect with the wider blogging community. If this is you, then you need to know what people are blogging about so that you can join in too. Great tools for doing this are Yahoo Buzz and Google Trends as well as looking at what’s on the rise at Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon and Technorati.

In the early days, it won’t be enough just to blog about the same topics. You will need to back this up by promoting your posts on those same social sites as well as on sites like Twitter. Speaking of Twitter, another place to find trending topics is on Hashtags, where you can see what people are tweeting about. The site give the number of people using those hashtags, so if you are able to dash off a quick post, you could reap the rewards by enjoying a quick burst of traffic.

Now that you’ve got post ideas, it’s time to start writing and publishing content. There are also a lot of other management tasks that go with that and we’ll look at some of those in the next post.

Sharon Hurley Hall
Get Paid To Write Online.com

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