Archive for September 20th, 2007
How I find blog ideas
A few days ago Chris Brogran wrote a post titled “100 Blog Topics I Hope YOU Write“. Needless to say, it was a great list. I’m going to take one of those topics and use it today: 9. How I find blog ideas
1. RSS feeds are great. With a good reader you can scan through a lot of sites very quickly looking for something that you might find good to blog about.
2. Google Alerts. These work great for finding good articles or blog posts on a subject I want and are easier to sort through than news sites in general.
3. Link surfing. I spend most of my time online link surfing, which usually leaves me knee-deep in open tabs. What I do is find a site that interests me and open all ‘read more’ or ’see also’ links in a new tab but continue reading the page I’m on. Once I finish opening anything directly on that page, I close it and often have 4-10 more tabs waiting for me to look at, which often have more links on it. Thus, tons of links to surf. It’s rare that I actually google more than 5 things a day.
4. Friends. You’d be shocked how many good things you can get from your friends. Because I’m always looking for blog topics, I have an open-door policy with most of my friends and allow them to spam me with whatever they find. It works really well a lot of the time. More heads are better than one.
5. Digg (or other sites similar) are great for finding some good news stories to put up. However, I often use this as a last resort solely because the more popular something is, the more people have already written about it. Finding another source often leaves for a better post.
