How to Quickly Find and Organize Smart Ideas for Future Posts
This is a guest post by Gilbert Ross
Blog writing can be fun and a rewarding hobby or business. Unlike traditional publishing, blogs give you the benefit of having immediate response and feedback from your community and an endorsement in the form of social bookmarks and Twitter or Facebook following.
These benefits, however, come at a price. You must pay the community back with frequent good quality content.
The point of having good quality articles is widely understood and agreed upon by the blogging community. The problem most bloggers have is to deliver good quality material frequently and consistently.
If you are a blogger who is nodding his head in approval right now, be prepared for some good news. There are ways of getting very efficient in finding new ideas for future articles and organizing those ideas in a way that will make them easy to pick up and write about whenever you want.
How to get new ideas:
- Use social bookmarking sites such as Digg or Delicious to leverage on othersí research. This is how I see it ñ instead of spending plenty of online hours trying to hop on from one site to another in search for something interesting, there are millions of people who like busy ants have done the job for you already! This is what social bookmarking is about. Say I want to find some ideas about fishing. I search for ëfishingí in Digg and articles, video and images about fishing will come up sorted out by their number of Diggs. In other words by the number of times people voted them as interesting. In this way the chances are that youíd come across interesting ideas hundred times faster than if you had to crawl the web yourself. You also get a good feel of what people are interested in reading about! Priceless.
- Carry a pen and notebook wherever you go. This sounds low tech I know but still works miracles. The reason behind it is that often a lot of ideas spark when we arenít really expecting them at our desks. You could be on a bus stop or in a cafÈ or anywhere when the idea bolts in. This is common because when we are trying to solve a problem or search for an idea, the answer may take some time to incubate then resurface when we are leisurely not thinking about it.
- Keep note of interesting discussions with friends. Remember the pen and notebook? Here it comes in handy. Very often I find really cool or interesting subjects to write about when discussing something with friends. An engaging conversation can have the equivalent effect on the brain as a 30 minute solid exercise on the body. It massages out ideas like no other thing. Use it to your advantage. Jot down those a-ha thoughts before they disappear in nothingness.
- Look for old popular posts in your blog or anyoneís blog. Who told you that you have to look into undiscovered territory to come up with something interesting? Ideas are there to be re-shaped and re-invented. Trust me, this has worked for millennia. Say you found an old post that had gathered quite some interest. Pick up the important points and redirect them and combine them with fresher and more updated perspectives on the subject. This is not recycling but building on momentum.
How to organize the ideas:
- Use applications such as Evernote to track and organize your note fragments and ideas. Evernote is fantastic. You can jot down ideas or clip text, images and videos from the web and it will store them in a digital notebook. You can tag the notes and any word in the notes is searchable ñ even text within images!! Letís say you saw an interesting advert at an airport. You take a picture on you mobile device and store it in Evernote. You can then search for a word you remember in the image and the image comes up in a second. It is also web based or installable in a pen drive to follow you wherever you go. Brilliant stuff!
- Jot down keywords and sentences that come to mind without stopping as soon as you have found a theme or subject to write about. Donít worry about writing stupid or irrelevant stuff. Clean later. Donít bother about sequence or order. Itís important not to stop the flow. You can use any text editor. I use pen and paper.
- Read through the keywords and phrases once or twice, delete the odd stuff and sort out the rest into structured concepts and sentences. Put them in sequence and tag them if needed. The latter means adding a short foot note to the concept that will later remind you what was the big idea behind it. Sometimes an idea seems perfectly ingenious in its birth but when we look at it a week later we canít remember what it was all about.
- Copy the result in a text file and save under a folder which bears the name of the theme/subject.
- You are ready! You have the core structure for an article ready in the drawer. All that remains is picking it up and weaving those ideas into an article.
Note: These steps can be performed in a relatively small amount of time. The great advantage of this method is that you can run these steps quickly and frequently. Hence you can store a number of these files beforehand and use them for future articles.
For more articles from Gilbert Ross be sure to check out his blog Soul Hiker. You can subscribe here or follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
21 Responses to “How to Quickly Find and Organize Smart Ideas for Future Posts”
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Oh thank-you – I am such a newbie, I had no idea you could use Digg and Delicious in that way. Great idea for efficient, targeted research. I’m going to try it for my next post.
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Gilbert,
Nice tips. I always carry a pen and paper to brainstorm new post ideas. However, lately I just use Evernote on my iPhone. I’ll take a picture, leave a voice message, or just type something in. Then, when I get back to my computer, it’s right there waiting for me.
Thanks,
Chris Masiello
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Hey Gilbert,
Glad to see you getting your name out there. I love all these tips and do most of them already. Good tip on using Dig. One thing I would add is to use the comments in somebody’s blog posts to see what kinds of things you can find there.
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This is a very interesting way to create a strategy for content creation – thanks for these ideas, Gilbert.
I agree with Srinivas Rao that comments are also a great source of post ideas.
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Love this post, Gilbert! It’s so useful for bloggers!
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I’m hardly objective, but Alltop is as good a source for finding stuff as the sites you mentioned:
http://alltop.com/all
Eg, if you wanted to blog about blogging:
http://blogging.alltop.com/
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Excellent ideas. It’s important to always have a backlog of posts ready to go because sometimes when you have the time to write, nothing comes.
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I, too, use Evernote for capturing blog post ideas. What’s really cool is their iPhone app, which enables me to capture ideas anywhere on my iPod Touch and then sync them to the Evernote web application, where I can flesh them out or even use it as a writing environment. What a great tool!
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@AMI – Thanks! I’m glad the tips are of some good help for you.
@Chris – Both pen & paper and Evernote (especially on a mob app such as iphone/ipod) are a great way of jotting down notes on the move.
I agree that evernote is so much more efficient and powerful than a pen and paper but there are some people like me who get their cog wheels moving as soon as they start scribbling over paper! (my daughter will definitely not have that since she was born completely in the digital age)
@ Srini – hey there! – thanks for the tip!! It’s definitely a good one to be added to my list – in fact your comment here proves it so!
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@Mary – Thanks for having me here :)
@ Matt – good point you’re mentioning. It is always important to have a ‘buffer’ of about 2-3 posts (depending on your post frequency). We all know that there are days or weeks when you are too busy to research or write articles. Having a couple down the sleeve is a nice solution to that.
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Many of my ideas come from other blogs,this is why I like reading other blogs so much.
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When it comes to organizing my ideas I prefer mindmapping software. It really works great.
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very nice article, although I do not feel any problem in writing, I was looking for months, one good article to explain these steps to my friends , and honestly speaking, I am not capable of writing such a good and nice article.
Thanks.
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All great ideas.
I am always looking for something to put in my blog. However, finding the time to research and come up with ideas is usually my problem. Maybe, in a year or two, when I leave the full time work force, I will have the time to really write more posts.
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Hi Mary .. thanks for bringing Gilbert across.
Gilbert – great ideas .. I like the idea of getting ahead .. I must get back to Evernote .. lots stored there, but just couldn’t quite get to grips with it at that stage .. now I’m freer of commitments I can start again.
I do now – transfer bits across to word docs .. simply because I started that way earlier this year .. and as you say pen and pencil are very good tools .. also one of those tapes that comes on as you talk ..
I must try the Delicious and Digg ideas ..
Thanks – have good Christmases .. Hilary Melton-Butcher
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Thanks for the great ideas Gilbert. I haven’t used Digg the way you’ve mentioned but I am definitely going to try it now.
I agree with the pocket notebook. I wonder how many brilliant ideas have been lost because someone forgot to write it down to remember!
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@ Karol – Definitely! Mind mapping software is great especially for those who are right-brainers and more visual. Besides most of them are freeware or open source.
@Mohsin – Thanks! I hope the article will come in handy and useful to your friends.
@ Sefcug – being a full time blogger would be ideal especially if it is your true passion!! In the meantime, however, there are things, such as the above, that can help us be more efficient and productive thus freeing up some of our limited time.
@Hilary – Thanks! Yes I would definitely recommend getting back to Evernote. It’s a fantastic tool. If you are still comfortable with other methods like me, you can use Evernote to augment those methods instead of fully replacing them. Either way, it still helps a lot.
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Thanks for your blog and this helpful blog post. I, too, use Evernote on all my computers and iPhone.
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Thanks for the ideas. I’ve hit the six-month decline in post frequency largely due to lack of ideas that excite me. Delicious and Digg seem like a great way to jumpstart my brain as well as reading blogs like this.
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This is a fantastic post about capturing blog ideas and researching. I never KNEW about Digg (though I’ve seen it everywhere!!) and will now use it as a tool when I get my blog started.
And wow have you got my mind rolling in terms of capturing thoughts and ideas (thousands a day) that pass through my head and which could be the jumping off point for posts/articles about literally, ten thousand things! Yes, unfortunately I have one of those brains that never stops! Need an “off” switch, alas no such thing exists…….but what I do already have is the small notebook and pen to carry and
LOVE the idea to hold onto thoughts, impression, conversations, observations – oh what one sees during the course of a day – and I thank you for these “pearls” to use in order to compile material so that not only may I get out of my “stall” but that I can begin blogging! I now know how essential it is for me to do so, how important it is to be interesting, relevant and captivating. I am grateful for your share. With a little luck – and thanks to your help and tips of others, there will be a “Colleen” blog before long!!
Best regards
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I have been thinking how to get fresh ideas when you start off with a blog, and there you were. That’s exactly what I needed to know.
Although using Digg does seem like recycling, I like your basic idea of not to re-invent the whole wheel. Eases my conscience a bit in case I need to borrow ideas in future, but if I’d try doing it now or not is another matter altogether.
However, I love the crisp helpful pointers you provide, so thank you!
Best,
Browneyed.
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