Trawling the Net

The best way to get new writing material for your blog is undoubtedly by visiting other blogs in your niche. It might seem counterintuitive, but think about it for just a moment.

By reading blogs in your niche, you get ideas on what to write for your own blog. Not just be seeing vague ideas and topics, but also by the possibility of entering a discussion with other like minded bloggers. When you see a blog post which sparks your writing muscles into activity, try linking to that blog post in your own. Why should you do this? For the same reason you always link to other blogs.

If they see the incoming link, they might pay your blog a visit, and if they like what they see with regards to your post they might respond with a post of their own. In this way, you strike up a kind of conversation, and earn yourself valuable incoming links to your website. You get loads of potential content through the conversation, and potentially loads more visitors to your blog.

At the very least, the comment sections on other blogs might give you fuel for your creative fires. Look at dissenting opinions and maybe you'll find a thought occuring to you that never popped up before. See if you can find points or relevant links in the comments which you can use to your advantage in creating new content for your own website.

Other blogs offer the richest sources of potential topics of blogging, and should be recognised as such.

If checking the news doesn't work for you, you can always try flicking through forums across the internet related to your chosen niche. There are a lot of places you can try, and you don't even need to become a member. If you're niche is about console gaming, just type a search into Google for 'console gaming forums' and see what pops up.

Take a glance through a few of the top results, and see if anything strikes you as an interesting topic to talk about. Are the people on the forum having a discussion about the benefits of consoles over the PC? Write a post sharing your opinion. Use the conversation and debates from forums to get your imagination rolling and start responding to the various things people on the internet are saying about your chosen topic.

This is also a great way to increase your number of backlinks. Put a link to your blog in your signature and start posting on the forum with your responses to various topics. Maybe even drop in a link to a related blog post you have made. Just be careful not to spam posts or links. If you do, you'll probably result in getting yourself banned which will negate all the hard work you already did.

If you're really struggling for something to write for your blog, or maybe for articles you then wish to sell online, there's few things better than using news websites for inspiration.

There's a new site for everything these days, and scanning through the latest news in your chosen niche can really help get your mind ticking over. For example, do you blog about helping people to find jobs? Well there might be something in the news relating to a jobs fair, or perhaps a company opened a new factory and is looking for workers.

Once you find something relevant to your blog and your niche, see if you can think of something to write about it. Either share your opinion, or just tell people about it. Read the news article and describe what thoughts go through your head while you're reading it. Maybe get a note pad out if you're watching the news on your TV and jot down anything that catches your interest, anything that comes to mind.

With the near constant bombardment of news on the internet, you are bound to find something relevant to your blog and its audience. It's just a case of setting aside fifteen to twenty minutes to look for something and then taking an hour out of your day to write about it.

As you're no doubt aware, this blog isn't exactly new, and yet has no content. I just restarted everything to give myself a clean slate to work on and now I'm working on warming up the old writing engine.

I'm no longer in college, so I have loads of time to write for this thing, and I have every intention of taking advantage of that fact. The problem is, it's been a long time since I've written anything for this blog at all. I don't want it to be some niche thing where I struggle for topics by constraining myself to a particular niche to write in. Mostly I'll stick to my own interests, which usually relates to the internet and media like games and movies.

I've been moving across various forums and websites, opening up communications with people. It's helped me get back a kind of inspiration, since if people on a forum create a topic which interests me it kickstarts my brain into coming up with something to write. I've been breezing across forums finding topics and responding to them, jumpstarting my debating skills and my imagination. With any luck, I'll have some good material to start posting by next week.

I'm sure a lot of people have trouble coming up with things to write just the same as me, and I'm happy to give you some advice on getting ideas and motivation for writing. Starting Monday, next week, I'll write one post every day giving ideas on how to get topics and jumpstart your motivation for writing. With any luck, you'll be able to get yourself writing in no time.

Just what I need to refresh my blogging drive. A fresh start, free to take this blog wherever I want it to go. With any luck, now that I'm out of university I'll do a better job of working on my blog.

Hopefully anyway. I still have to decide now what direction I want to take this. It's nice having a clean slate to start from though. I don't know, I just find myself more motivated when I have more work to do if you know what I mean. If anyone has any ideas on what kind of things I can post, feel free to share them here.