How to Find Content for Your Blog

Blogging can be a fun pastime, but sometimes the ideas don't flow freely. Here are some techniques for finding content for your blog when your creative well runs dry.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• Computer with internet connection

1. Visit social sites like StumbleUpon, Facebook, and Digg. Study the recent posts to learn about hot topics, or current events in the news. Lurking on these sites just takes a few minutes and you'll find plenty of material for your blog.
2. Go to Technorati.com. You'll find the top popular searches, news stories, blogs, and topics. Technorati has a search function so you can search by topic. The results are organized in chronological order, with the most recent first. You'll be able to stay on top of new, exciting, popular topics.
3. Subscribe to news feeds such as Google Reader. Simply designate the topics that you want to be informed about, and you'll receive email updates when news content is updated.
4. Visit news websites like Fox News, CNN News, ABC News, USA Today, etc. Top stories will be on the front page. You'll find plenty of news content, and be sure to read comments by other readers. You can link to the commenters' blogs for some interesting reading.
5. Subscribe to blogs in your own industry. For example, say you write a blog on eCommerce. You can subscribe to blogs about eBay, online selling, retail sales, consumer trends, shopping, etc. Pay attention to what other bloggers are talking about.
6. Use content from article sites such as eZine Articles, Go Articles, and Articles Base. Be sure to give the author credit if you use someone else's work. These articles are free to use on your blog, just search for the subject you need.
7. Invite guest bloggers. Send an invitation to your colleagues or put up a post on your groups and forums that you are interested in guest bloggers. Not only will the guest write the post, but they can cross-promote their appearance on your blog to their readers.
8. Ask you readers for suggestions. Simply create a post asking readers what they want to know or be informed about. Be sure to provide your email address so your readers can get in touch with you.

Tips & Warnings

• Blog content is easy to find. To be time efficient, subscribe to different sources so that content is automatically delivered to you via email.