A lack of content ideas can kill a blog – without fresh and useful content, you are left to copy what everyone else is doing. I’m going to share with you one of the ways that I use to come up with fresh blog content ideas. It is easy, it works, and if you use it, you will probably never run out of ideas for your own blog.

By reframing (looking at the issue through a new set of eyes), we can all create unique and interesting blog content. It is something that I’ve found myself doing (such as using social psychology as a way of looking for a common blog motivator) and a lot of other people do it too.
How do you reframe to generate content ideas for your blog? Here’s the manual way:

1. what topics do you blog about? Write a list of everything that you blog about, and in the same list, everything that you aspire to blog about within your blog’s niche.
2. Create a set of file cards that covers your blog topics, one topic per card. This is your topic deck.
3. Think about all the things that you have done in your life – professional expertise, travel experiences, anecdotes from school, books you read, hobbies that you’ve had in the past, your favourite cuisine, your hobbies, professional associations that you belong to, places you’ve worked, blogs you subscribe to that are of interest but may lie outside the current niche of your blog – and all of the things that you would like to do with the rest of your life. Write these down in a list.
4. Write these experiences on file cards, one thing at a time – This is your experience deck.
5. You can probably see where this is going – yep, I’m going to ask you to keep the two decks separate, then shuffle them, and pick a card from each deck without looking.
6. Look at the topic and experience combination and think about how the experience could be applied to the topic. For example, from my own topic/experience combinations, I blog about blogging, and I used to be a fairly avid Australian native aquarium fish breeder. What has fishkeeping got to do with blogging? Thinking laterally, there are a number of interesting article topics in this – one might be fish breeding strategies (like the heavy post-natal care of the mouth-brooding Rift Lake cichlids vs the “set and forget” egg-scatterers) as blogging styles.
7. When you come up with a new idea, or set of ideas, please record them where you will find them. I send myself an email from my phone with a “todo” header (and GMail autotags these so that they stand out) with a posting idea – and the next time I am near a full-sized keyboard I enter these into the appropriate blog as draft posts. I know that I could email WordPress directly, but I find that the todo system serves me well at this stage as I can send one email with multiple topics.
8. If you are feeling masochistic – look at the topic and think about how it applies to the experience – and viola, you’ve got an idea for a new blog. I try not to do this any more, as I seem to come up with an idea for a new blog every second day anyway, and it drives me nuts not being able to write the content for all of them
9. Periodically, review your lists.

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