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Every Blogger or Freelance writer at times faces a situation when he is short of ideas and finds it hard to think of anything to write. This situation is termed as Writer’s block or Blogger’s Block and can be frustrating, especially when there is an urgency to come up with an article .
Image by re_birf
The important thing is to capture and manage an idea whenever and wherever you get it. I wrote an elaborate post about it here. But then there are always some bad days when you just can’t get an idea .
You may have read posts which tell you to write a list or do an interview of another blogger or write a link post when you are short of ideas. Hence here I decided to mention some different and innovative ways to combat this situation and get ideas from places, often overlooked during our daily lives .
1: Newspaper and Magazines
Have you forgotten one of the oldest mediums to disburse knowledge and information? Reading newspapers and magazines can certainly help you gain ideas, often different and unique , which you can blog about. Even Darren has written an excellent post about improving your blog by reading a magazine .
2: Browse through Old Emails
You may be getting a lot of emails everyday, some of which might be questions by readers, some might be suggestions and about a lot of other stuff. Now its time to sit and digg into those hundreds of emails and you never know when an excellent idea hits your mind and you are ready to blog about it .
3: Browse through Youtube
Browsing through Youtube can be a good idea. You can search for videos using keywords of your choice and you may come across a nice video which relates to what you blog about. It can act as a refresher for your readers too .
4: Browse through your Stumbles and Diggs
If you are a frequent user of networks like StumbleUpon and Digg, this is the time to go through your activities and your stumbles and diggs. Alternatively, if you use any other social networks, just browse through the stuff you have got stored in your account. It might bring up a new idea .
5: Go through stuff stored on your computer and your browser bookmarks
If you are like me, who apart from bookmarking online, bookmarks a lot of stuff offline on the browser and also downloads and saves stuff like ebooks, documents etc, then its time to ditch the internet, get offline and browse through heaps of data on your computer. Read those ebooks which you downloaded but could never get the time to read, go online and go to the websites which you bookmarked but never visited again. And you’ll find that the ideas have started flowing.
I hope the above methods help you as a blogger/writer and you are never short of ideas .
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Good tips….
I’ve personally not had to use any of these because
a)my posting schedule is slow and easy
b)I write down tons of ideas whenever I get them - even if I’m away from home, in a shower, or taking a breakfast.
Sumesh’s last blog post..10 beautiful iMac setups worth a look (pics)
Yes Sumesh, it is always good to write down immediately whenever you get ideas.
I’d like to share another very useful trick for writer’s block that my friend recommended.
When you feel like you’re not getting ideas, ask questions. Question every other minute. Think and question about everything you do. Try it and you’ll get a lot of ideas, especially for ‘how to’ posts.
Being a tech blogger, explore the choices in a software - the menus, the commands and ask questions ‘Why not this’.
Some things can be really obvious to us, but not everyone knows such things. Just write a post, and watch the visits from Google!
Good post, Stumbled.
One thing that helps me is I keep a list of all topics that strike me as writing a blog on. In fact at any given time I will have at least 5-6 topics that I need to start writing on. Other than that I do believe if you are stuck then take a break. No sense in trying to write and write stuff that is uninspiring or not from the heart if your heart is not really into it. Better to wait a while and take a break till you recharge yourself.
moserw
http://www.nela.in
Hi,
Just saw your guest post at Problogger. That was such a very practical but mostly ignored question. Very nice post.
Anyway,I made a similar post about writer’s block around 2 months ago.
If you’ll allow me, I’ll summarized it there.
Listen to good music.
Read other blogs.
Read older posts.
Take a cool shower.
That’s it. Thanks.
I’ll try to be back.