Sources of Inspiration

I’m writing articles for my websites for about two years now and encountered the so called writers block several times. Having to write articles every single day can put immense pressure on you if you do not know how to cope with this situation. I found several methods over the course of those two years that help me whenever I run out of ideas and I would like to introduce at least some of them to you.

Sometimes the simplest things help. Take a walk, watch a movie, talk to a friend, read a book. Everything that could flush your mind and distract you from the writers block. It is not a good idea to force something, let it flow and you will reach the point where the ideas come flooding back.

• Use the comments on your website. Comments are a valuable source of new ideas and suggestions to expand already written stories or write completely new ones. This has another advantage, you enter a dialog with your visitors. They see that you read their comments and react by writing a new article. State the source in a sentence that mentions the name of the guest. E-mails can be used in a similar way.
• Visit sites that write about similar topics and read their articles. Maybe you will find something that is worth writing or commenting about. This builds at the same time a connection between your site and the source which could result in traffic and friendship with the other site owner.
• Yahoo Answers is a great source for Inspiration. Select the category that your blog is about and start reading the questions of the users. If you find an interesting one write about it at your website and add that as the answer to the question as well. Leads to more traffic as a side effect.
• Blog at a different location. Visit an internet cafe or library and use one of their computers to update your blog. You could write about the different location in the introduction for instance. Visiting another location has some advantages, you have to travel there which means you have some time at hand to think about matters of interest without the computer in reach.
• Collect ideas and tips in advance. I do this by adding a new post with just the heading and a short text that could become a great article in the future. You could also buy a notebook and write down ideas immediately when they come to your mind. Use this repository if you don’t know what to write about.
• Ask your readers. A great way of finding out what your readers want is to ask them directly in an article. This works best if you have a certain number of daily visitors and comments enabled. Blogs that are just starting will probably get no reply at all.
• Write from a different perspective. Lets say you have a blog that opposes DRM (digital rights management). A different perspective would be to step into the shoes of someone that enforces DRM. Try to write about their arguments for DRM and let your readers pick em apart.

More inspiration and ideas can be found at Darren’s article “Battling Bloggers Block“.