Facibus On Blogging

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.

I had lunch on Friday with Donna Maurer, Stephen Hall, Matt Hodgson and Maria Murphy. Namedropping aside, we had a discussion on reframing as a means of generating new ideas. The basic methodology has been mentioned a hundred times before: Take a common issue and look at it through a wildly different set of eyes to provide a unique perspective.

Here’s the example we used: Donna mentioned that she and her family have been looking at new cars. I said that I thought that people set themselves a few deciding factors (number of seats, new vs used, size, fuel type) and then went with their gut - it was essentially an emotional decision. Someone said that it was thus uncategorisable - and then the discussion turned to the science of why we buy, and I suggested we come up with an information architecture approach for the buying of cars - a model for mapping the purchase decisions. After a little more discussion Matt proposed that it was probably something that could be tracked with topic maps - and probably presented that way as well.

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. Jeri Merrell (a professional project manager) wrote a series of articles on project management for small business that applies itself very well to blogging.

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.

As an extension to this - you could do this programmatically using a form of buzzword generator in your favourite web-friendly language.

1. Create two arrays to store your lists.
2. On “Generate”, choose one item from each of your two lists at random.
3. Display them together.

I’ve put an example start in this direction up as test_list based on some code from The JavaScript Source. While it is not complete, you are welcome to grab the code and have a play

A lot of things besides lack of content can kill your blog - untrustworthy server web hosting, for instance. Make sure your hosting and business email account company is reliable before you trust all of your Internet needs to them. Exchange outsourcing is so easy, so you really have no excuse!