Tag Archive for 'Ideas'

How To Come Up With Post Ideas

One of the hardest things, for some bloggers, is coming up with new things to post about. Sometimes you find yourself with writers block, or sometimes you think you’ve run out of topics you could possibly talk about, but that isn’t the case! Read on to discover how to come up with more post ideas than you can keep up with…

First thing to do is look at what your blog is about. For this example, we’ll pretend we’re blogging about “places to travel in Asia”, but it doesn’t matter whatever you’re writing about, the first thing you should do is google it. But don’t just google “Places to travel in Asia”, try other similar phrases as well. For this example, we tried:

  1. “Places to travel in Asia”
  2. “Top destinations in Asia”
  3. “Asia Destinations”
  4. “Travel Asia”
  5. “Travel In Asia”
  6. “Sights and Activities in Asia”
  7. “Asia Holiday”

The list could go on, but you get the picture. Now, if we take a look at a page of google search results for “Travel Asia” we get this:

As you can see from this image, I’ve highlighted just a few of the sponsored results. You’ll notice some keywords in their like GAP Adventures, Tours, Flights and Malaysia (as well as “Travel Asia”). This means that people are paying google to show ads whenever people search for the keywords “Travel” and “Asia” or both together, so if you can write about these subjects, you’ll hopefully get those same ads on your site, which can earn you some money (if you’re using AdSense). Now, we can use these keywords to come up with a list of possible things to write about:

  1. GAP Year Adventures in Asia
  2. Tours in Asia
  3. Tours in (Asian Country/City)
  4. Holidays To Malaysia
  5. Cheapest Flights To Asia (Maybe a weekly/monthly feature)

As you can see I’ve already come up with 5 different ideas. I could even do separate articles for different tours of Asia, and do separate articles for tours in each country or city, and I could even turn “Cheapest Flights To Asia” into a weekly or monthly series. On top of that, I could write about the cheapest flights from the UK, UK and Australia, as these are the countries people are most likely to be flying from, OR i could analyze my traffic and write about the cheapest flights to Asia from the countries that most of my visitors come from.

The next thing I’ll want to do is have a look at my incoming searches. This means having a look at the terms people were searching for when they ended up at my site. If you are running Wordpress, which chances are you are, I suggest you install the stat-monitoring plugin called Statpress. It will automatically track all your statistics for you, including the latest Search Terms used to find your site.

Now, take a look at the top results on all of the search results you’ve looked at. Look at the content of these pages. What are they doing that you aren’t? What content do they have that you don’t? You can write about anything that is even slightly related to your site.

Another place to find articles ideas is from the news. Look at, for example, your local news site, or even cnn or the bbc. Look for any news about the subject your blogging about. For example, I could blog about the recent Earth quakes in China or the Tsunami in Myanmar (Burma) because they would effect travel in Asia. Remember to credit any sources of information though. Finally, you can also try looking at similar blogs. If your blog’s “niche” is quite a crowded niche, why not try doing a best-of-the-week type post? Summarize all the best posts of the week in your niche, so then visitors can go to your blog not only for your own original content, but also to have the best related posts served up once a week with no effort at all.

So through just a few easy methods, you can come up with dozens, or potentially hundreds, of new posting ideas.

Done.

5 Ideas I Wish I Had Had


I just thought I’d list five different sites that I sit there and think I wish I had thought of that. This isn’t really a great post by any stretch, but it might inspire a couple of people to think a little more about what sites they make and what can make them money…

  1. Myspace
    Over 100,000,000 users? I think I could find a way to monetize that ;)
  2. Facebook
    If I had made facebook, I wouldn’t have made so many little annoying applications available. They’d be screened for “Crapness” and “Uselessness”. Still, I wouldn’t mind the money.
  3. Youtube
    Youtube still hasn’t tapped into it’s full potential for revenue. Things could be going far with youtube.
  4. Weblogs, Inc
    One of the biggest and most profitable blog networks. If only I had been in the game 5 years ago.
  5. Wikipedia
    If this had been handled in a more commercial fashion, It could be a goldmine of profit and opportunity. Could even have more paid moderators to get rid of those pesky vandals…

As you can tell, this really isn’t a very helpful or insightful post, but today’s been a slow day…