Brainstorming Your Blog Posts

One of the biggest questions I get from people when I tell them they need a blog on their website is “What do I blog about? I don’t know if I have that much to say.”

Well, its not as hard as you might think. One of the first things that I suggest is to brainstorm out ideas around your topic. You can do this on paper at first. I personally like to use mind mapping software to do this as it puts everything in one cluster of ideas I can go back to and review when I need to find ideas to talk about.

First, write down your main topic around your business. Then just start letting ideas fly out. Don’t over complicate it, just start writing out one or two word ideas of things people ask you about related to your business. Here is an example:

Let’s say you are a landscaper. Landscaping is your main topic.

Heres a few quick ideas to brainstorm:

Tree care
Shrub care
when to reseed
Why reseeding is important
How often to water
How to keep bugs off my flowers

Thats just a quick list done in about 5 seconds. Write down as many topics as possible like this. Give yourself about 20 minutes to do this. Ask your coworkers or partners to help with ideas. In no time at all you’ll have a dozen or so topics to write about ready to go.

Once you have this done. You can even batch write your articles. Just start writing about each of the topics you just came up with. Nothing says you can’t write a ton of articles all in one sitting. If you do this right, you could end up with 20 or 30 articles ready to be loaded in to your blog in a couple of hours.

If your creative juices are flowing, just keep writing. If you come up with a couple of things to say about one topic, go ahead and write 2-3 articles based around the same topic. Just keep writing as long as you have ideas coming out.

If you don’t have time to write everything at once, that’s ok. Now you have a list to come back to every time you need to think of a new blog topic to write about.

I like to have a running list of topics that I add to all the time. This way when I sit down to write and I don’t have something come up off the top of my head, I can always go back to my mind map and see what I have on the list. This way I don’t forget about any ideas I come up with and I always have a list of things I can talk about each and every time I need to write up a new blog post.