We’ve all seen it. Some of us may have even experienced it first hand and lived to regret it. When you first come up with an idea for your new blog, you can get filled up on a huge rush of adrenaline. You’re start off with a big enthusiastic bang, putting all the right pieces in the place so that your blog has the best chance at making it big. You have all these great ideas for blog posts and you turn into far more prolific a writer than you could have ever imagined.
There is an air of excitement in the air as the words just come flowing freely out of your fingers and onto the computer screen. You just have so much you want to say and share, because you sincerely feel like you’re providing the great content that everyone keeps talking about. Content is king, right? And then, before you know it, the well runs dry.
You go from publishing multiple blog posts a day to having extended periods with no new posts at all. A week goes by. Then two weeks. Then even longer. Suddenly, the rabid posting activity on your blog has quieted down to near utter silence. And you wonder why your blog isn’t doing so well.
Yes, one of the biggest ongoing challenges that you are going to face as a blogger is coming up with ideas and topics for new blog posts. This is a little less of an issue if your chosen niche is one with frequent news stories on which you can provide your comments and insight, but it’s definitely an issue for just about everyone else. So, what can you do?
It starts by slightly shifting your mindset in terms of how you choose to approach your blog topics in the first place. The ideas you have for individual blog posts do not have to exist in isolation. The most successful blogs are the ones that are able to integrate with the existing archive to build an increasingly robust, informative and entertaining tapestry of posts for the audience to enjoy.
In this way, the simple strategy that you can employ is to write multiple blog posts on the same basic idea. This isn’t to say that you should simply reiterate what you’ve already said. That’s redundant and it doesn’t provide any extra value to the reader. What you should be doing is taking your initial idea for a blog post and developing it such that it can be fodder for multiple blog posts. Allow me to illustrate with a basic example.
Using the context of a blog about Internet marketing and professional blogging, let’s say that you want to talk about the importance of having a good WordPress theme and design for your blog. The less experienced blogger might roll several small ideas into one post covering everything to do with WordPress design; the better approach is to break it up into logical, more in-depth pieces.
You could have one post that talks about what colors to use, another that discusses the number of columns you might want to have, and yet another that explores how best to utilize the footer section. This can go on and on, developing what was one post idea into a whole series of blog posts. And the same strategy and principle can be applied to practically any blog post idea you might have.
And remember, be realistic about how often you think you can post new content on your blog. Going back to the top of today’s post, you don’t want to have a blog get overrun with an avalanche of posts for a few days only to fall silent for weeks on end. Space that content out accordingly and keep your readers coming back for more.