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Starting a Blog: Have a Topic in Mind and Stick With It!

So you’ve started blogging and have several posts out there. It is good to have a mix in your content, but unless you have a specific topic in mind, it is likely that you won’t be able to hold your audience’s interest.

If you have any hope on running a successful blog (we’ll define what success on a blog is later), you must keep posting. The most important thing to keep in mind is to not get discouraged. If you see that you haven’t posted for a while and your stats are going down, don’t obsess about stats – it’s time to post!

Everything Blogging Book

Aliza Sherman Risdahl, author of The Everything Blogging Book makes several good points on the topic, including:

Allotting an hour a day to your blog is helpful, but even if you can only spare thirty minutes, you can still make it work.


I assure you. Everyone gets writer’s block. It happens to all writers at some point, so why not you? Here are a few ideas to get the creative juices flowing:

Stumbleupon Stumbleupon. Go through some stumbles. Feel free to check out some of mine as well.
Keep up on the news regarding your topic. Google news and many other news sites will help you out here.
Read some popular blogs. Have a tech blog? Take a look at what Scoble and Techcrunch are talking about.

Read company blogs. Companies like to tell their users the latest and greatest on their product blogs. Alexa for instance, the company many use to search their traffic rankings and Google ranking, keeps users up to date on status, program updates and issues on their blog.

Check out social news. The Social news out there have changed the way news is disseminated. Sites like Netscape, Digg and Reddit allow an individual to publish news that is accessible to the world – so much so that there are times that traditional news sources actually use the individuals as sources to their own stories!

Ask me! While I’m certainly not an expert in any old thing you might be blogging about, I can usually speak intelligently on different topics (read: I’m not just a tech guy). Feel free to comment on this post to discuss ideas!

 

4 Comments

  1. brian

    thanks for the pingback, Metagg!

  2. Pete White

    I tend just to write about whatever comes into my head on my blog. Usually it works!

  3. brian

    @Pete: it’s certainly a good way to go. You never know what will interest people sometimes!

  4. xztheericzx

    i’m eric. joining a couple boards and looking
    forward to participating. hehe unless i get
    too distracted!

    eric