Running a blog can be really rewarding, whether you are doing it for fun, to make a secondary income stream from advertising or affiliate marketing, or to promote your business. A blog has even become pretty much an essential for business websites who want to engage with more people and mark themselves out as authorities in the fields they work in.

Of course, a blog is only as good as its content. No amount of promotion on social media or SEO efforts will get you a good, returning reader base if your content isn’t unique and valuable. Good content should be either informative or entertaining – and great content should be both.

Creating that content can be hard work, however. You don’t just need the quality, but also regular new posts to keep your blog fresh and give readers a good reason to keep returning. Keeping that content coming and making sure you always have good ideas for posts that add value to your readers can be a difficult thing to do at times, and most blog owners do occasionally suffer from writer’s block or time pressures that get in the way.

Here, then, are some tips to help you make sure you can keep producing good and frequent articles for your blog.

Keep a Rolling Idea List

Having a list of ideas for posts can help you a lot. Even if you normally write news pieces, you can come up with some ideas for more evergreen posts you can quickly produce when you are drawing a blank for a topic. A good way to do this is to start with a brainstorming session to create a list of 10-20 topic ideas, and then just keep adding to that list whenever you have a new idea to top it up as you take ideas from it and use them.

If you have your content written by professional writers, but come up with the directions for the posts yourself, you may need a longer list and more regular idea producing sessions, so you can order a batch of articles at a time. In this case, the idea is still the same, but you may need to formalize the process a bit more.

Have Recurring Article Series

If you have a good idea, you can often get more than one post out of it by creating a series on that topic. Alternatively, you can come up with themes to make posts about on certain days or dates. You may have already seen this kind of approach used on personal blogs. For instance, on a personal blog Monday might be when you always post a recipe, and Thursday might be when you always post a review. Having a series can help you structure the content on your site too as it grows over time.

Revisit Old Topics

Once your blog has been running for a while, you may find you can get new content by revisiting ideas you covered a long time ago and updating them with new developments, things that have changed in the time in between, or more things you have discovered about that topic since writing the original piece. If you cover news stories for your industry or niche, you can also follow up on old stories and talk about their long term impact from a position of hindsight.

This, when done well, can make your blog very engaging and consistent, showing that you do keep on top of the latest news and have a real interest in reporting the latest stories to your readers.

Get Some Guest Writers

Unless the purpose of your blog is to showcase your own writing or opinions, it can be a great idea to have some content written by other people that is relevant to your audience. This naturally gets you some new content with no actual writing, but it can also give your blog a fresh tone and some new perspectives. Whether it is a post written for fun by a friend, a post written by an expert on a topic your readers will be interested in, or a post by a professional writer looking to promote themselves, if it is high quality and relevant, your audience will appreciate it.

Some blogs even get their readers to submit articles to them as a way to let them get more involved while also gaining some new content.

Vary Your Media

A good piece of content doesn’t have to be a long, detailed written article. If you want to have frequent posts, but don’t always have the resources to write that kind of thing, consider mixing up the types of posts you use. An image gallery or slideshow can also be an interesting post, or you can try making videos or podcasts to share on your blog.

You can also vary post length. Some things may require detailed coverage or analysis, whereas other things may work well as brief news stories or simple tips with just a snippet of text and a picture. As long as the content delivers something useful, it doesn’t have to take forever to produce.

Ask Your Readers!

If you want some more ideas for content, why not simply ask your readers via social media what they want you to talk about? Is there something they’d like you to review, or give your thoughts on? Is there a tutorial they’d like from you, or some advice? You can directly ask them, or try taking ideas from the comments and questions you get on other posts or tweets. Rather than answer in full as a comment or reply, why not make a whole post out of it and link them to it? This shows your readers you respond to them seriously, and also helps you create a great new post!

These are just a few ways to make sure you never run out of inspiration for strong content your readers will find useful, valuable, and worth coming back for.

1 Comment

  1. mansi desai

    Reply

    hi,

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    mansi desai

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