How to Create Great Content for your Blog

There are many methods for deciding what to write for your blog, but I’m going to share the process I use, and which I hope will work for you as well as it works for me.

I keep a list of posts I want to write (on an Excel spreadsheet) and as soon as it starts to get down to three or four, I’ll carry out the following exercise to top it back up to twenty five or thirty, so I do the this about once a month.

What I do is a mixture of brainstorming and mind mapping, and I do it the old fashioned way with pen and paper!

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

1/ Burning Issues

We all gather these as we go about our normal lives – things that you see or read that make you want to write something. So step one is to get these down. They’re often topical, news related, or are a response to something you’ve read on another blog that you either strongly agree or disagree with.

2/ Expanding on Successful Posts

This is where the mind mapping comes in. I jot down the five posts that have received the most traffic in the last month. Then I spend some time thinking how I can expand on them – is there a post I can write as an extension? Is there a question post I can create around it? Can I write a more detailed version and add to the original? Is there an obvious part two? I keep going with this until I have at least five more posts listed under the original. I don’t exclude anything at this stage.

Here’s an example:

My post Selling Advertising on your blog got a lot of traffic, so applying the process to that, I end up with:

• How to use Plug Ins to create advertising on your blog
• How to design and create an advert for an advertiser
• Creating a prospect list of people to sell adverts to
• Setting up a Paypal account
• Giving blog advertisers value for their money

See? It’s quite simple, and you’ll be amazed at how quickly the ideas come. Just doing this will give you 25 posts!

3/ Refine the list

The next step is to go through each and pause to think them through. Do they fit in with the blog’s niche? Are they relevant to your readers? Can you actually write the post? Do you have access to the information you need to do so? In the example above, I might well take out the Paypal one, on the grounds that all my readers probably already have a Paypal account. At this point edit out anything that’s not relevant, or too difficult.

4/ Add the new post titles, with notes, to your plan

Now’s the time to schedule your new post titles into your blogging plan. Use whatever system you have – some bloggers do certain types of posts on certain days, some alternate between long and short posts, just work it out to suit your blog. Don’t forget to add some notes to remind yourself of what you had in mind. That’s it! Job Done!

What can you add to this?

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