Not Sure What to Write About for your Blog?
- 22 June 2016
If you’re not sure about what to write about, start keeping a list to capture ideas as they occur to you. Are there a few questions customers or clients ask a lot? Each one of those can be a blog post. Are there a few questions they should be asking, but don’t? Each one of those can be a blog post, too.
Having an idea capture system is the key.
Use email folders and browser bookmarks for filing ideas; apps like Evernote for jotting down ideas on the fly; whatever system you can for filing ideas under categories. Create a new card/folder/page every time you have an idea for a post. Then add a comment every time you come across an article or another resource that you could use in the post. Whatever you use for collecting and storing ideas. This saves a ton of time for research, which can easily take up 50 to 70 percent of the time spent writing the post.
You may not need as elaborate a system as this. An index card might do just fine, or even a few post-it notes stuck up on a wall. The best system is the one you will use. The point is to have enough ideas to not have to worry about what you’ll write about.
Another way to get over not being sure about what to write is to read a few of your competitors’ blogs before you write your blog post drafts. Hopefully, you’ll look at their posts and immediately think of things to write about. Or you’ll look at their posts and think, “I could do a much better job than this” and then you’ll go prove it.
After people know what to write about, the next thing they tend to worry about is how much they have to write. Posts can be short or long. Keep it varied. Regularly try to write posts that are significantly longer than 500 words. Aim for about 800 to 1,200 words. If you can manage to write out a huge 2,000 word post even once every quarter, that’s great. But it does depend on your business, organisation or blog content. It may change over time.
The most important thing is to get started and keep going.