Blogging ruts happen to the best of us. It’s not to say that you’re lazy or don’t finish things you’ve started. Most of the time, it’s just a lack of motivation.
Because everyone experiences a blogging rut, I hope this post will appeal to all of my readers. Here are 10 tips and ideas to get out of a rut, and to keep your posts coming.
1. Start a New Series of Posts
Start a new tutorial series, article series, or something of your own creativity. You’ll want to see the series through until the end, and you’ll always have a specific topic ready at hand.
I’ve started the jQuery tutorial series, and although they’re coming out slowly, it always gives me something to work on. As another example, a writer at Problogger has created a series of articles dedicated to “Moving Your Blog to the Next Level”.
2. Get Your Readers Involved
You don’t always have to do all the typing. Write a post for your readers to get involved, and let them provide most of the information.
Either ask a question, conduct a poll, or request a debate on a controversial topic. Doing this gives you a small break, while still getting great feedback, and adding interactivity to your blog.
3. Blog About Something Different
This what I’m doing now. I’m still writing about something I believe my readers will care about, but it’s not my basic design technique or tutorial.
Getting out of your own trend can make things more interesting. You’ll probably learn something along the way too.
4. Read Other Blogs
Other blogs can be inspiring, and may even be the reason you started blogging in the first place. Take in what other blogs are writing about and how they’re writing it.
It’s not that you should look for other blogs and post the same titles. Reading other blogs, however, may help you discover something you’re interested in, or give you a similar idea of what you’d like to blog about.
Better yet, getting familiar with blogs you love gives you a better definition of yourself and your interests.
5. Make an Easy Post
Posting doesn’t always have to take hours. Well, thought-out articles that are informative are best, but sometimes keeping your readers updated can be just as useful. Post something interesting you’ve found, a poll or question, or a site update.
A lot of blogs will create posts like “10 Web Design Tutorials”, or “25 Great CSS Hacks”. This useful to the reader, but don’t take a lot of writing on your part.
6. Conduct a Poll
Sometimes a post can be as simple as conducting a poll or asking a question. By putting it in a post, you’ll get much better feedback than if it were on your sidebar, and you’ll get more in-depth results.
That post can add a lot of interactivity to your blog, making it all about the opinions of your readers. After the poll is complete, you can build upon the feedback you received for a longer, more informative post.
7. Read Your Archives
Reading your own archives provides a lot of benefits. Among these are:
- They can remind you of a topic you haven’t written on in awhile.
- You can see what posts your readers commented more on.
- You can see what categories may be a bit bare, while others are full of content. This can help you add more variety to your blog.
- You can read older comments to see what people liked/dislikes about previous types of posts.
Reading archives will provide more motivation to blog, but may also provide a better sense of what to blog for the sake of your visitors.
8. Build upon an Existing Idea
Whether you’ve found a post by somebody else or by your own archives, build upon it. Do this especially if you see a particular post with a lot of attention. It is likely that the readers will want more if you build upon the same idea in a second post.
9. Analyze Your Interests
As time goes on, interests change, and sometimes change back. It’s important to keep up with your own interests when you blog. There is a good chance it will still apply to your blog’s niche, and you’ll be giving your visitors more variety. Also, chances are, your visitor’s interests change too.
For example, sometimes I can easily get into a design phase where I love learning anything and everything about the design aspect of being a webmaster. At other times, I love to learn programming languages or build upon my current knowledge of them. Sometimes, I just want to know more about the analytics of my own website and how others grow.
If you feel writing on a certain topic is seeming to be a chore, feel free to explore other options. Forcing yourself to write on a specific topic may, unknowingly, create badly written posts.
10. Just Do It
Sometimes the best way to get out of a blogging rut is to just force yourself to blog. Oftentimes our lives get busy and we distract ourselves enough that forget why we enjoy blogging in the first place.
An old teacher once told me, “Starting the assignment is 50% of the work.” There is a lot of truth in what he said. Giving yourself the discipline to do something is a large part of doing any project. Once you start, though, you’re already halfway done.
This not to say that blogging, or anything else you’re interested in, is supposed to be work. Anything can feel like work if you get bored with it. There is always that one ounce of motivation, though, that got you to start blogging in the first place. Get in there and start blogging again, and your motivation should soon return.
