Day 11: Brainstorming and Planning Blog Post Ideas

Welcome to the ProBlogger podcast, episode 11 and day 11 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. Today, your challenge is to come up with at least 10 blog post ideas for future posts on your blog. In today’s episode, I’m going to share with you one technique that I used to come up with hundreds of ideas for the first couple of years of my blog at Digital Photography School. I’ll also share some alternative techniques that you might like to use to get some inspiration.

Today’s topic is so important. Many bloggers get stuck at this idea stage of creating content, so hopefully, it will give you a head start on that. Today’s show notes, with some further reading and the tools mentioned in the show, are at problogger.com/podcast/11. There’s also an opportunity on those show notes to connect with what others are doing in the challenge. 

Before we get into it, a couple of answers to questions I’ve had over the last few days. One is around how frequently should you be doing these challenges. I know some of you are doing them on a daily basis as I’m publishing them. But if you don’t have time, don’t feel that you have to do them daily. I know some of you are doing them every second day or even two or three per week and that’s totally fine. It’s probably more important that you do them well than you do them every day. These podcasts will be here forever so feel free to take your time.

The second question is about the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Workbook which I have mentioned in numerous episodes before. As many of you know, this series is based upon a workbook that has been previously available on ProBlogger for a few years now. It has been updated into a second edition and it is available at a 50% off code. You can get full details of that at problogger.com/podcast/workbook, but please don’t feel that you have to grab it.

While it does contain some bonus material that we won’t cover in the podcast, we have designed this podcast to be able to be used without that workbook. Please do feel free to pick it up or to just follow along on the podcast. Now, let’s get into day 11 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog.

Hi. This is Darren Rowse from ProBlogger and welcome to day 11 in 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, where we’re giving you a challenge every day to do something to improve your blog. Today’s challenge is one that I love, it’s my favorite one. I know a lot of those who have done the 31-day challenge in the past have loved this day, too. It’s actually a day where some of the things we’ve done in the last 10 days begin to come together. Some of the things you’ve already set up, if you’ve been following through in the previous 10 challenges, you’re going to get to use them today.

Here’s the question that I know a lot of bloggers face, some on a daily basis. It’s a question we ask ourselves quite regularly. What in the world am I going to write today? I don’t know about you but I ask that question quite a bit and it’s a question we’ve all lost in one way or another. That’s something that many of us struggle with on an ongoing basis. What do I write about? A trap that many bloggers face is that they don’t ask this question until I sit down to write and they’re under the pressure to produce something now. Set aside some time to write, what am I going to write about?

Today’s challenge is to do something that’s going to alleviate some of that pressure, to allow you just to get on with creating content. What I’ve found over the years is that brainstorming ahead of time what you will write removes one big obstacle in creating great content. Brainstorming ahead of time means that you can just sit down to write and you’ve already got the topic in front of you. Cuts down so much time and allows you just to write.

The other good reason for brainstorming ahead of time is that it allows you to create content that takes readers on a journey. If you are thinking ahead about the content that’s going to be on your blog over the next week, the next month, or even longer, you can actually build posts that create posts that build upon one another in a more effective way. Your readers actually notice that. They actually feel like they’re going on a journey with you rather than just sitting down and every day you hit them with something random. Actually building content in this way is great. It creates momentum, it builds anticipation on your blog and that’s great for building a readership that keeps coming back and gets subscribers.

What I want to talk about today is a process for coming up with ideas for your blog. There are many ways to do this. I actually outline one of them in the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog workbook which I’m not going to talk a whole heap about today. It’s really based upon looking at your last blog post and finding ideas in that for future ones. But today, I want to share with you another exercise. It’s something that I’ve come up with since writing the first 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Workbook. It’s really simple but it’s quite powerful. It will actually give you some clarity about what your blog is about as well as coming out with some ideas. It’s really simple.

All you need is a piece of paper and a pen or pencil. You could do the same thing on a whiteboard if you like to. Get your piece of paper and just draw a line from one side of the page to the other horizontally. On the left-hand side, put an A, point A. On the right-hand side, put a point B. I want you to imagine that that line is a timeline of sorts and it is the timeline of when a reader arrives on your blog for the first time and where your reader will be as a result of reading your blog.

At point A, I want you to write a simple sentence that describes who your reader is when they arrive at your blog for the first time. It doesn’t have to be overly complicated. Depending upon what your blog is, it could be really anything. For me, at Digital Photography School, my point A is that my readers are camera owners who’re stuck in automatic mode. They’ve got this camera that has all these wonderful features, but they never really click their dial out of order. This describes the vast majority of camera owners. That’s your point A. Who is your reader now? Or who is your reader when they first arrive?

At point B, I want you to write a sentence that describes who you want your reader to be as a result of reading your blog. Say for a year, two years, or three years. It doesn’t really matter. Who do you want your reader to become? For me at Digital Photography School, it’s that they are a camera owner who has full creative control over their camera. They know how to use the dials, they know how to use the settings and they’ve got creative control.

That change isn’t going to change the world but it’s a change and really that’s what we’re doing here. We’re trying to identify the change that we’re trying to bring with our blog. This will mean different things for different people. I talked to one blogger recently who is a parenting blogger and she did this exercise and heard change that she described as quite profound. She said her point A was an angry, frustrated, and confused parent whose family was dysfunctional. It’s a pretty bleak point A. But her point B was a patient, happy, and in control parent whose family was functional. She went on to describe these two points in greater detail. That’s a good exercise to do as well but really just doing it in a sentence is a good thing for today’s exercise.

What’s the change you’re trying to bring with your blog? Once you’ve identified this change, then it’s time to break it down and this is where you start getting ideas for blog posts. For that change to be brought about, what does a reader need to learn or what phases do they need to go through? Break it down. Start to describe the process, the lessons that someone might need to get from point A to Point B.

For me at Digital Photography School, it was a lot of things. I came up with over 200 and included things like really basic stuff like how to hold a camera. Concepts like how to take a well-exposed photo so they needed to understand things like aperture and shutter speed. They also needed to get confident. It wasn’t just technical things, it was self-development. How do you get confident in taking photos of other people, asking people to pose for you, and directing people in their posing? Things like composition, lighting, the list goes on and it went on and on and on.

This simple exercise unearthed about 200 things in about an hour. Things that I thought someone would need to know to go from being in a fully automatic mode to having creative control of their camera. Now hopefully, you can see where the blog posts ideas are coming in from this. Each of those 200 things ended up being a piece of content on my blog. In fact, for the first two years of Digital Photography School, that was the content I created. It was the cornerstone content, most of it on my blog. It’s content that I continue to this day to refer back to because it really takes my readers through that stage, that process, that change of getting creative control of their cameras. 

This is an exercise I’ve seen many bloggers do in all kinds of niches. Identify the change you try and bring and then break it down. Suddenly, you’ve got a whole heap of ideas for content. If that process doesn’t work for you, there’s a whole heap of other ways that you could go about this.

Really, my challenge today is for you to come up with 10 ideas for content for your blog. You might use the process that I outline in the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Workbook, which is really about looking at your last few blog posts and looking for questions that readers might have asked or asking, “How could I extend this post? How could I take a different tack on it? What did I gloss over in writing these posts that I could come back to?” where you might want to tap into some of the things you’ve set up over the last few days. For instance, you could tap into the alerts and subscriptions that you set up yesterday in episode 10. Did someone write a blog post or produce a podcast that you could extend or give your opinion on? That might be a link post that you could write.

You might want to follow up with the reader that you emailed in episode 5 and ask if they’d mind sharing any questions, problems, or challenges that they currently have. You might want to look over the last 20 or so comments on your blog to see if there were any questions there. Similarly, you might want to head into the forum group that you joined in episode 9 or the social media account that you’ve been working on in episode 8 to hunt for questions or discussions that could get you a post idea.

Another brainstorming question you can ask is what problems, questions, or challenges did I have when I started out? What questions did I have a year ago? Writing about your own problems, challenges, questions, and how you overcome them and answer them is a great way to get content ideas.

Lastly, you might want to get on a call with a blogger, a friend, a reader even to brainstorm together. I know in the early days, I was a part of a couple of small blogging groups that I found really helpful to brainstorm. Even today, with the team that I have, we quite often brainstorm together. I find the ideas come so much faster when I’m doing it with other people.

Your challenge today is to come up with at least 10 content post ideas, you might come up with more. If you do, just go with it. Come up with as many as you can because it’s going to save you a whole heap of time later. The key here is not to get out of brainstorming mode and into writing mode. You want to stay in brainstorming mode as long as you can. You might want to come up with a title or a couple of points that you might cover in the post as you come up with that idea that might save you sometime later as well, but don’t do that if it’s not coming easily. Don’t go too deep into each idea, just stay as much as you can in brainstorming mode.

The key, whatever you do, is to write them down, capture them in some way. If you don’t yet have a system for collecting ideas, today’s the day to set that up as well. It might just be a simple notebook that you have on your computer or that you carry around with you. It might be on your computer. You set up a folder and every time you get an idea, you open a text document and you dump it in there with the idea that maybe a couple of points.

The system I use is using Evernote, which is a great app that ‘s also on my computer. Pretty much everywhere I am, if I get an idea, I open up Evernote, I’ve got a notebook for each of my blogs, and I create a note for each idea that I have. Sometimes, I just drop down the idea itself and sometimes, it’s a little bit deeper or I put in a few points and maybe the opening line. If you don’t capture your ideas, you’ll lose them and you’ll never ever write those posts. So, your challenge today is to create at least 10 blog post ideas. You don’t have to do any more than that, just create the ideas. See how many you can do.

I hope you enjoy today’s challenge as much as I do. I find this one to be so useful and I build it into my every week of blogging. I put aside every week to just do this exact exercise both alone and then with my team when they’re around and I get all kinds of ideas from doing it. It’s really helped me to create a lot of momentum on my blog. Give it a go, tell us how you found today’s challenge by leaving a comment on today’s show notes where I also give you some visuals on how to do the exercise at problogger.com/podcast/11.

You can also subscribe to get updates about future episodes at problogger.com/podcast/subscribe and you can just pop your email in there and you’ll get an email every time we update about a new episode of the podcast but also the occasional post about new posts on ProBlogger. That’s only every now and again though.

Thanks for tuning in today. I look forward to chatting with you tomorrow on day 12 with 31 days to build a better blog, where we’re going to take your 10 ideas and do something with them. Please, get your 10 ideas ready and then tune in tomorrow for the next step in the process.