Pacing Your Blog Ideas

Pacing your blog ideas kind of goes hand in hand with the idea of posting consistently.  I've lost track of how many times I've heard people say that they don't want to start a blog because they don't know what to write about or they started a blog and then ran out of ideas.

Here's a secret: blogging takes practice.

Even prolific authors/writers have to practice blogging because it's not the same thing as writing a book or a short story.  But, as with most things in life, with practice it becomes easier.  Your brain starts to have a "blog mode."  Think about how it is playing Scrabble.  The first time you play or if you haven't played in a long time you're not in "Scrabble mode." You can't think of any words and the words you do think of are usually small and simple.  A few games in, your brain gets warmed up and you can start dishing out those more complex 5-letter words.

Same goes for blogging.  The first few weeks are going to be rough.  But the more you blog the more ideas will start to pop into your head.  You'll start to think of different ways to approach the same topic.  But this isn't going to happen overnight.

If you're having a rough time coming up with ideas, here's what I suggest: don't blog until you have three or four blog topics you want to write about.  Once you come up with the ideas, give yourself a few hours and write all of the blogs at once.  But don't post them right away!  Schedule your blogs so one posts each week for the next few weeks.

Why do this instead of just posting one every day?  A blog that updates weekly still looks active to potential new viewers.  It also means that you basically gave yourself a month to come up with more blog ideas.  Coming up with new blog ideas every day is stressful.  Coming up with blog ideas over the span of a month is reasonable.