Top 10 best practices to get fresh ideas for blogging

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In my previous post I had discussed about the reasons of not getting fresh ideas for blogging regularly. In this post I will discuss about the techniques, resources and the overall best practices for getting regular ideas and inspiration for you blog post. Now you must be thinking why am I saying these best practices? Because here in this article the techniques I have mentioned, will be in your regular routine, you have to practice these regularly until you are habituated with these. I believe that generating or curating interesting ideas on a regular basis is not an easy task, it requires a lot of activities regularly that’s why here I am saying ” best practices to get fresh ideas for blogging”. So don’t worry if you follow these on a regular basis then getting ideas will not be a big problem. You just need some patience and discipline to follow these on a regular basis and after sometime these will be easily included on your regular routine.

So be patient and follow the below mentioned activities:

1. Visit different blogs regularly: If you make it a habit then it can be the most productive way to get ideas. Now you must be thinking that is it the very first activity? Yes it is. Here I am asking you to not just visit and read a blog post. I am telling you to make this your regular habit. Make a routine let say 1 hr each day, in that time frame you visit some of your favorite blogs read some quality posts, think on it and share your views. If you do this regularly then you will get different thoughts, ideas and concepts that you can utilize in your blog post.
2. Make reading a habit: If you are a Writer/ Blogger or you are aspiring to be one, then reading should be in your to do list for everyday. Because it is one of the main source of inspiration and knowledge. Beside this regular reading habit helps you to keep you mind open. So take out some times from your daily work and in that time you can read books of your favorite author or you can also read your favorite magazines, journals, newspapers or any thing of your own interest. Because if you read voraciously then automatically lot’s of questions will come to your mind and you will start to think on those. So in that process several views or ideas will come to your mind and you can easily transform those into a very interesting blog post.
3. Forum participation: Start participating on different forums in your niche. If you spend quality times in those forums there you can interact with lots of like minded people like you. If you have any doubt ask there or solve others question by using your expertise. It can benefit you in  several ways, your core knowledge will increase and you will get varieties of concepts to discuss on your post.
4. Be Active & Regular in Social Media: Believe it or not we are leaving in the age of social media. So use the power of this media in a right way. Only your presence is not enough there, be active & regular in social media. Post, share, comment, re share what interests you. In this way you will be aware of several trending and hot topics which you can use as av inspiration in your blog post.
5. Setup your Feed readers:  List down all your favorite bloggers and blogs and subscribe via RSS to get all latest updates to your feed reader. In this way there is no chance to skip any post. You can be up to date with all of your interests.
6. Setup Alert services: If you want to stay up to the minute details of what is happening in your niche then you can use popular alert services like Google Alert, Topsy etc. By doing this you can get lots of fresh topics to cover.
7. Engage your readers and analyse on their views : It is a very important lesson for a blogger which is user engagement. So when an user comments on your post, always give that an attention and reply. Because it has two types of benefits first one is you give attention to your readers, so the readers will be encouraged to give more feedback and second you have read and analysed your readers view. Because you have written a post from a certain perspective but when an user read it he/ she can give their own view through comments then thinking or analyzing on those views, a new side can be found and based on that and you can get the idea of a new post.
8. Find problems and solve them: You have your own niche where your specialization is. When you know a topic very well and constantly working on it then during working you can face lots of problems and you have to solve those. So each of those problem with their solutions can be a unique post for your readers who may have faced the same problem.
9. Use Q/A sites: Join and participate in popular Q/A sites like Yahoo! Answers or Answerbag. These are the hubs of ideas because in those sites several people from different background asks different types of question So from those question you can find different ideas or inspiration for next blog post.
10. Participate in local events: If it’s possible then participate diffident events, trade shows or seminars in your field. Believe me these type of shows not just give you exposure but helps you to increase your knowledge and expertise in your domain and you can convert all these to generate different post for your blog.

So my suggestions to you is don’t just follow these steps but make these your habit on a regular basis as much as you can. I know following all the steps every day will be quite overwhelming to you so make a routine and divide all the works according to your schedule. Then you can easily followup all the steps.

If you have more interesting ideas then feel free to share with us.