5 Tips to Quickly Writing A Quality Post Part I

I started writing this post without any idea on how long it will end up being. The title certainly is not a good indicator of the length of the post, so I decided to break it up into two parts for easier digestion.

Quite often, bloggers struggle to write. Regardless of the niche, sooner or later, they will hit some sort of a writer’s block where they simply cannot get out of. Breaking out of that block is not the question as time as proven again and again that people do break out eventually. However, the importance lies in how quickly you break out of it and what quality of posts you write during your break out. It is easy to start writing low quality posts, but as much as your blog is an image of yourself, you certainly don’t want to take that route.

I find myself mostly struggling to find time to blog. Unlike many, I rarely (actually don’t recall once, but I will say rarely to be safe) find myself out of ideas to post about. Why? I go through these five steps to find ideas, and I go through these unconsciously. However, you can start by practicing them consciously and maybe these might melt into your daily schedule without you intending them to be. Then, voila! You overflow with ideas!

Read And Don’t Read Your Niche

Everyone nowadays will tell you this. Read blogs in your niche. I will say, “Read them, but don’t only read them.” This is because by reading other blogs related to your niche, you start to unconsciously develop a writing style that isn’t your own flavor, but one that imitates the blogs you are subscribed to. I always find new bloggers trying to imitate the bigger bloggers. If you read carefully into the bigger blogs, you will notice:

• they are talking in their own unique styles
• they have experience
• they have their unique sources of ideas

By imitating them, you are confined to only their share of knowledge and ideas. That limits your blog and it can only be, at the most, an “imitating” blog. You don’t want that happening.

To prevent that, you should read other blogs and writings. Newspapers, online news articles, and personal blogs are just a few to mention. Go for the global section that applies to everyone. The intention here is to read over multiple styles to start defining your own style. However, as the idea of this post is to give you ideas to talk about, I will also confidently state that by reading other subjects, you will also create an idea database in your mind. Some things will spark posts to write about and others won’t. In the long run though, you will be pulling stuff to implement into your posts from multiple sources here and there to create quality posts.

What’s Hot?

You may have brilliant ideas. However, if no one is interested in your ideas, although they may be brilliant, you are not going to get much recognition.  So, you want to blog about topics that are on everyone’s minds. There are multiple ways to do this.

• Visit forums related to your niche. For example, since I’m talking about blogging in this post, I may visit super niche specific forums such as BloggersBB or relatively focused forums such as Digital Point’s Blogging section. Regardless of which ones you visit, you are bound to see people asking questions of all difficulty and interest.
• Carefully read the comments on your blog and others’ blogs. You will start to see that there are many commentators that ask questions that unfortunately, many bloggers nowadays do not take the time to respond to. This is your chance to jump on the idea and write about it.
• Follow people on Twitter. The microblogging scene has added a whole new dimension to this blogging game and it certainly is a pot filled with stuff to talk about. See what Twitter users in your field are talking about and try to join in on the conversation, both using Twitter and using your blog.
• Run a poll on your site to see what people want to know about. Sometimes, you have to ask your visitors what they want and serve it to them. If you don’t have big traffic, this may not be the most ideal option, but minimal traffic will still give you some results.

Three More Ways To Fish Ideas!

So, I guess I’m not that great of a planner, making this post initially go past a thousand words. Little doses of medicine are much better than chucking the entire thing down your throat, so I’ll let you guys munch on these thoughts for a while until I release the next three ways.