Shaun Low

As you may or may not know, I love to write, and I especially love to write meaningful, helpful, newsworthy, and controversial blog posts. While all of these types of blog posts will be something that your readers will most likely want to read and enjoy, there are times where we all suffer from “blogger brain freeze”, “writer’s block”, or whatever you want to call it. You know that you want to write a blog post, or you have been tasked by your boss to write a blog post: but you just don’t know where to start looking for ideas.

In this example, I am going to look for ideas for a real estate blog post. Certainly, you could use any other phrase or industry phrase. Or, even your most popular keyword phrase or a keyword phrase that you want to “rank for” in the search engine results. Here are five places to look for blog post ideas.

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For the past couple of years, people have been asking if blogging is now dead. Now, as you read this blog post, you might expect that if I took the time to write it, I probably don’t agree. And I don’t. But the “blogging is dead: crowd does have a point–I just don’t think the situation is as extreme as they say.

Now, I could go ahead and list all the reasons that blogging is not dead, but truthfully, that misses the point. The reason that people love to declare things dead runs deeper than some analytical look at the pros and cons. What’s really happening here is simple human nature’s interest in finding the answer.

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“Our target audience is too old for blogs. They’re too old for Tweeter (sic). They’re too old for Facebook. I don’t see our audience reading blogs.”

At those words my ears perked up. I grabbed my cup of coffee and sauntered swaggered strode into the conference room where a couple of my co-workers were meeting with a prospect who came in to talk about search engine optimization for their site that targets women over 40.

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If you’re a blogger, you’ll know how comments make a blog. They can take the original post into a whole new level altogether, with opposing views and discussions opening up some great viewpoints.

Personally, I’ve used the comments on some of my posts (and those on other blogs) as inspiration for new posts here. I’ll add my comment on the original post, and then expand on it with a new or slightly different take. That then opens the discussion up even further, both on the new post and the original (play fair – always link back to your inspiration).

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From a marketing perspective, a blog can be a great way of getting the word out about yourself, your business, or anything you care about. A blog can get your message seen by interested viewers and people who come in from search engines, and most of the time more blogging equals more visitors. Our own blog represents a sizable amount of the traffic we get from Google, Yahoo, and Bing, since we are covering relevant and timely topics that web searchers want to see.

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There’s a bit of a hullabaloo floating around the Internet concerning the Momdot mommy blogger network and their proposed PR Blackout for one week in August.

The topic is being  discussed on Twitter pretty vocally and bloggers and PR pros are coming out with their take on both sides of the argument.

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Every Sunday evening from 8.00pm CST, #blogchat takes place on Twitter.

Hosted by the uber-smart Mack Collier, it’s a discussion by bloggers about blogging – tips, tricks, tools of the trade, best practices and more.

It’s quickly evolved into one of the must-attend chat events on Twitter, and I never fail to come away with some cool new tidbits of information every week.

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There comes a point in every blogger’s life when, despite their best efforts, they find themselves scraping the bottom of the barrel. Maybe it’s the heat in the dead of summer, the fact that everyone is on vacation while you toil away at the old keyboard, or just a bit of old-fashioned burnout.

Regardless of the cause of your blogger’s angst, if you blog for a living, you’ve got to find a way to push through it, Rocky! In general, I find that the bloggers who write the most compelling content are the ones with well-rounded interests, which helps to keep them from regurgitating the same content in different flavors.

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WordTracker recently announced the launch of a new free Firefox extension that aids you in doing keyword research while blogging. The keyword tool works with any publishing software, and helps you ensure you work selected keywords into the content. The tool sits to the left of the browser window, and as you type, it will search your post and does an analysis of the text in your content to see if any of the phrases appear.
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There are a lot of people that will tell you that you need a blog because it’ll perform better in search engines and gain more traffic. This is not completely false, but it’s not exactly true either.

Blogs tend to perform better because of the abundance of content. Blogs empower users to create content in a way that is easy and fun. By doing so, users are creating content on a daily, or weekly, basis.

More content means more traffic and links. This is more for search engines to index, more for users to link to, and more to share with their friends and co-workers.

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