Come Up with 10 Post Ideas Day11 31dbbb

Ten Post Ideas

Make plans by using mindmapping or other methods of brainstorming for post ideas keeps you on track to easily publish your words and ideas. Find the right direction for your thoughts. Make up ideas in groupings. What are the topics you want to cover? Don’t be a train wreck!

Key Concepts

• Mind mapping taps into what you’ve recently written on your blog and helps you to identify ways to extend those ideas.
• On at least a monthly basis, spend a few minutes brainstorming ways that several previous posts can be extended. These ideas are logical next steps for readers wanting to explore this topic, some of them based upon actual questions from readers.
• Be as creative and outside-the-box as you want. Any idea is allowed at this point.
• In the end, though, be ruthless in culling ideas that add nothing to your blog.
• Keep an ideas document to keep track.

Questions:

1. How was this process useful to you?  Did you come up with ideas you didn’t think of before?
2. What was your favorite idea to come out of this process?

Response to someone struggling with this task by Erin

What helped me was to think of each post as a specific type of post. Is it a theoretical post? If so, turn it into a detailed post by making it a “How To” post. Is it an opinion post? If so, take the other side of the opinion in another post.   Is it a general process you’re writing about? Now break it up into chunks and be more detailed in later posts.   Are there experts you can interview?   If it’s a process, are there pitfalls to avoid?   Are you talking about a tool?   If so, what other types of tools can be used instead?   Compare/contrast them.

Basically just keep trying to find different angles of ideas.   Keep thinking of different ways to ask about a certain subject:   Who?, What?, Why?, When? How? Hope that helps. Nirvana Mamma

Mindmapping or brainstorming have always been a challenge for me. My brain shuts down as soon as you ask it for an idea. The stream of conscious finally stops. Might be a good way to start meditation. Blank. Nada. Being a fly by the seat of my pants type of gal, asking me to prepare is disastrous. Get me out and about without a pencil and paper and the ideas flow.

I am working on doing this task as a stream of consciousness. Silence Judge! Yes the judge within that says: what a bad idea! Why do you think that would work? Who cares about that? Shut off at the pass. Need to make an end run.

Obstacles. Go around. Break the rule. Breaking rules opens up lots of creativity. It is magic then. Coloring outside the lines comes to mind. Fear too! Blank.

The ideas need to be like paint being applied to a canvas. Free flowing. Smooth. Watercolor glides across the paper. The wet look has a sense of real. Ideas are flowers. Lots and lots of flowers.

Ways to come up with ideas comes from reading far and wide.

Use the resources around you.

1. Use keywords of your niche and search Amazon and read the book covers and table of contents. The titles of the chapters might be a good blog post. Searching Q&A forums Yahoo Answers, ehow, about.com and what are the top five questions in your niche. Take the questions, reword them and answer them. Google trends, predictions, and just plain old intuition on what is a good idea or subject. Use alerts. Go to Barnes & Noble and look at magazines. What is going on in your life?
2. Sports, food, entertainment, and tech are main categories of topics
3. Reasons to celebrate and using social media to do it
4. Link back to previous posts on your own blog
5. Link to other blogs and why
6. Titles and Meta Data for Search Engines
   1. How to ……….
   2. Review ………..
   3. Lists ……
   4. Top ten
   5. Weekly series – topics
   6. Trends for keywords
   7. Keywords
7. Writing
   1. A post of mindmapping by doing a stream of consciousness
   2. Writing must be sprinkled in there because I don’t know enough to make it a separate topic
8. Photography Blog
   1. Picture a day
   2. Photograph of the day
   3. What I wish I knew before doing xxxxx?
   4. Photography for beginners who don’t want to know about fstop or exposure
   5. Photo series on topics each week
9. Web Design
   1. Basics
   2. Design for the non-designer
   3. Wire Frames
   4. Project Management
   5. Networks
   6. WordPress and other tools
   7. Facebook Fan Pages
      1. Facebook Markup Language
      2. Driving traffic to your blog from Fan Pages



10. Fun Tourist
    1. Day trips
    2. State Parks
    3. Federal Parks
    4. Theme Parks
    5. Nature
11. Social Media
    1. Blogger series
       1. Beginner blogging
       2. Standing on the shoulders of giants
          1. Having their endorsement will enhance your business
          2. Connections
          3. Guest Posting
             1. Spreads your audience to more than those you know
             2. Makes others aware of your knowledge
             3. Content is king for getting ‘eyeballs’
             4. Getting to guest post on a very popular blog is ideal
       3. What I wish I knew before doing xxxxx?
       4. Write thank you’s
       5. Why posting in comments is good for you and the blogger you gave positive feedback?
          1. Be positive in posting to other blogs
          2. Become noticeable by your knowledge and positive postings
          3. Visibility
       6. Write about tools to do the process Mindmeister
    2. Interview other bloggers after following and/or reading their blog
    3. Multimedia Add ons
    4. Geek alert on blogger tools
12. Friday Finds is an idea picked up from Lynda and one I want to incorporate into my blogging career. This type of gesture is like paying it forward or random acts of kindness. Helping to shine the light on someone else is a gift we can give of our time.

Jos Groban sings You Raise Me Up and it just fills my being with joy, energy, and happiness.

Jos Groban has a voice that fills the insides out. Standing on others shoulders is part of his song. I like the idea of giving to others while shining the light on them, it does hit us, and we are better people because of it.

Resources

1. Making money freelance writing which has lots of howto’s listed for installing WordPress and configuring. Includes getting started as a freelancer, researching, and getting ideas.
2. Darren Rowse wrote why you should use Adsense on your blog
   1. Case study
   2. Bounce off questions from readers
   3. Collect links for improving earnings
   4. Ways to improve AdSense Earning
   5. Find someone to Interview who has been successful using Adsense
   6. Alternative revenue sources
3. Johnny Truant How to do 500 Times Better than Adsense
4. Another point of View by Liz on Third Tribe and other marketing angles
5. List of mind mapping applications you can try.
6. Darren recommends and uses MindNode for Mac users.

Updated April 15, 2011 with pictures formatting and some words. Tell me what you think of the new updated postings

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Eileen Lud­wig of Social Media School brings to the world decades of com­puter expe­ri­ence with a desire to learn and share cur­rent tech­nol­ogy mul­ti­me­dia tools for com­mu­ni­ca­tion. She is owner of four sites: Free­lance­Tourist , Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy, Web Design School, and Social Media School Each are in dif­fer­ent stages of devel­op­ment and evolution.

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