Brainstorming Techniques for Bloggers
A blog is an excellent way to boost your online presence and promote your own business. Additionally, you will need an impressive portfolio and active social media channels to further improve it. This is not an easy task, but it can be extremely rewarding if you write about topics that you like and form a readership community little by little.
One of the main tasks you should do as a blogger is to write articles, obviously. But, you may have no idea what to write about. It’s a cumbersome situation that every blogger wants to avoid. However, at some point, you may have to go through it. For such cases, it’s best to brainstorm in order to generate new topics you can write about.
Find problems and their respective solutions
Using your articles to solve some potential problems that your target audience may have is a great way to maintain and grow your readership base. They may share the content on social networks and provide you with more visibility as well.
You can use the comment section from your blog as well as social media in order to learn more about the topics that interest your readers. What’s more, you can always ask your readers to do a survey that would help you answer some of their most pressing questions. Of course, if you’re going to conduct a survey, make sure it’s a short one. Conducting a survey, in fact, could be a great strategy to keep your readers engaged, as they will feel that their opinion is valued and appreciated. So, don’t be afraid to ask questions as a blogger.
Once you have a list of possible problems that your readers face, you just have to choose one of them and start writing your take on the solution. Don’t hesitate to do some extra research in order to make your articles as relatable and helpful as possible.
Practice free writing
Free writing means putting all your ideas on paper — or digital format. It’s not necessary to have an organized structure like when you write an article for your blog. The goal of this exercise is to start writing and developing certain ideas. It’s an excellent way to make your mind work and can sometimes help you generate new ideas for future blog posts.
For this exercise to be effective you must determine a time frame when you’ll simply focus on free writing completely and interruption-free. Once the time is up, review what you have written; you will probably find some new ideas for blog articles in your content.
Associate concepts and words
For this exercise, you should start with a blank sheet of paper (real paper) and use a very general topic for the “title”. Due to the many options that a general topic offers, you can have several subtopics — write them as they occur to you. You can also write words, concepts or phrases that you associate with the chosen topic. Once you have finished with this exercise, you will automatically have plenty of fresh subtopics. The next step is to mix and match the words/concepts as you find connections between them. You can circle the related words and join them with a line. Have fun with different pen colors in this phase to avoid confusion when it comes to word matching. Once this exercise is finished you should have several ideas that get more specific and interesting compared to the general one you used to start with.
Make lists
Like the previously mentioned exercise, lists are also a way of associating ideas. You just have to start with a general topic and let the related subtopics come to you naturally. This list can have as many levels and categories as you want. By the end of the list, you are likely to have a couple of ideas and topics for your next articles. In addition, it’s a great way to exercise your mind and generate new ideas.
Ideally, you should use all possible methods to brainstorm and come up with new ideas for your blog. But, don’t hesitate to use your favorite method more than others if you know it works magically for your creative juices. Still, if you’re experiencing the writer’s block, and your favorite method of brainstorming isn’t working, open your mind to other options and try something new. Regardless of how you like to get in the mood for writing and generate new ideas, the following tips will definitely come in handy for all the bloggers out there:
· Organize a weekly or monthly schedule to perform these exercises, especially if you have a blog and you’re looking for a stable readership base.
· Always go with a specific time frame. The usual practice is to spend 30 minutes generating ideas and a few additional minutes reviewing the content that you’ve come up with through these exercises.
· Don’t judge yourself too harshly. The main objective of brainstorming is to boost your creativity. But if you start dissing certain ideas as bad or simply ridiculous, you will be undermining your creative potential. Keep an open mind and write down everything that you can think of. After all, you can filter all of that later on.
· Save all your brainstorming material, even if it means that you’ll have to get a special binder for when you use pen and paper. By having all your creative writing from the brainstorming sessions in one place, with past ideas at your disposal, you are bound to make things work better for you at the present moment as well.
