You Already Know how to Find the Best Blog Ideas
TL;DR
- Your personal experiences are enough to start blogging.
- Lean on your strengths and use an analogy to write unique blogs.
- You will get blog ideas by developing your voice.
The hardest question to answer when starting a blog is what to write about. Generating a list of blog ideas is one of your first steps. How to do this may not be obvious to you at first. Yet, you have an advantage that no one else has. That is your personal experience. Let them inform your choices at every step of the blogging process.
One thing that writers share is a sense of self and a remembrance of our history. Observing these things is a source of inspiration. It is from this ground that we can find our blog topics. Using the following techniques should aid you on your writing journey.
Your Strengths Make You Unique
Our personal strengths are how we get through life. Think about what skills you might put on a resume. Or the subjects that you excelled in at school. These strengths can be things like mathematics. But they can also be things like resilience, empathy, or determination.
This is one lesson that I’ve taken from life that serves me well. Play to your strengths when you don’t know what to do. This helps me deal with the unknown or solve any problem.
I will tell you my greatest strength is language. This isn’t a surprising revelation because I am a writer. But it goes beyond typing words on a page. It is how I understand the world and make sense of it. Knowing this about myself has led me to overcome my greatest challenge in life. Learning multiplication when I had to repeat fourth-grade math.
So, how does language help you learn math? That is through the use of analogy.
How to Use Analogy to Do Anything
I had more in common with my family when I was math anxious. They accepted that mathematics would not be my thing. Which was fine by them because they also felt that way about themselves. As you can imagine, they weren’t much help when it came to learning multiplication.
We used flash cards but my parents could not explain it to me.
I began to think about what I did well. What could I apply to this subject? My best grades were in English and I remembered something important.
One of my favorite activities was solving cryptograms with my mother. They scramble letters in popular sayings. You have to guess which letters represent the correct letters in the phrases. You use things like the rules of grammar to make guesses.
I thought, if letters can be other letters then letters can be numbers. I had no idea that this was one of the foundations of algebra at the time. Which helped me later in life. I made my little substitution code. And rewrote my multiplication problems as 1x2 becoming AxB.
Then I saw it for the first time. An equation is like a sentence. With operations acting like grammar. That the x in my problems was telling me something important. This is how I finally learned multiplication and fell in love with math.
This is the same method that you will use when thinking of blog ideas. The benefit of this is that it will differentiate your articles from the competition. Because no one has had the same experiences as you.
Blog Voice Separates You From Other Writers
If you have chosen your blog niche, then you already have some idea of what to write about . Albeit limited. The first place to start is to put your niche into a Google search to see what already exists. For example, my starting search was for “How to Start Blogging.” This is the question that I’m trying to answer with my articles.
You should be able to find some SEO keywords by doing this research. These are the topics that you should be discussing on your blog. But, that isn’t enough. Because anyone can write about them and you don’t want to create generic meh writing. There is no point in publishing things no one wants to read. You want people to interact with your content. Doing things like subscribing, making a sale, or hiring you as a freelancer.
How to Use Analogy in Your Writing
This is where we use the techniques described above. Make a document listing your strengths and how they relate to defining moments of your life or career. Times when you learned some lesson that you can impart in your writing. Then through the use of analogy apply these to the keyword research you’ve done. Find the connections to improve your writing.
How is this topic like something else you’ve experienced? This helps you generate many blog ideas because more than one thing might apply. You don’t have to put everything into one post. You can return to the topic again and again from a new fresh perspective. With something else to say.
I have a lot of opinions about keywords.
These repeated topics become themes of your blog further creating a personal brand. What people will remember about you. This is your blog voice. It is akin to your personality. It is what makes your writing memorable and different from other authors. People should recognize your voice right away. Even when you are publishing a guest post on another blog.
Conclusion
How to find blog ideas is an enduring question for new bloggers. There is no way to get started if you can’t find the inspiration to write. Luckily, the answer is simpler than expected. You use your personal experiences as the starting place to generate blog topics. From this, you can use analogy, your strengths, and what makes you unique to develop your blog voice. Which will help you stand out from your competition.
How will you use your experiences to create blog ideas? Tell us in the comments.