How To Create A Blog Posts Ideas Incubator

One of the most popular blog posts I ever wrote is 100 Ways to Improve Your Blog. Although it’s been more than 7 months since I’ve published it, I still get a few re-tweets per week and a decent number of monthly thank you emails. For a single blog post, that’s a lot.

If I would have to pick only one tip from all 100, one tip that drastically improved my blogging performance, that would be “keep an idea incubator”. Keeping and managing a posts ideas incubator impacted my blogging in so many positive ways: I never run out of interesting things to blog about, I always have a bird view of my blog topics (hence, I’m able to sketch my potential audience in more accurate way) and I’m constantly feeding my blog with fresh content. Which, to be honest, is the most important advantage of all.

What follows is the description of my own posts ideas incubator. I don’t advocate the use of a specific application, feel free to use whatever device/application you want, but I do believe that following a certain structure and strategy is beneficial. I’ll start with the strategies of capturing, will follow with strategies of inbox management and using a blogging setup, and will finish with a short tutorial on how to use the ideas incubator you just created. Be aware that this post is rather long, more than 2500 words.

How To Capture Blog Posts Ideas

I don’t know about you, but I get the most interesting and exciting blog posts ideas while I’m driving. Or while I’m in the middle of a conversation. Or while I’m exercising. The bottom line is that I get the best blog posts ideas while I’m NOT at the computer. After a few frustrating episodes (in which I even tried some mild self-hypnosis in order to recall “that brilliant idea” I had this morning in the car) I gave up trying to remember those bits and pieces and set up a capturing environment.

I soon realized that I need capturing devices for only two environments: mobile and computer.

1. Mobile Capturing Devices

I own an iPhone and I use it. Two of the most used applications on my iPhone (apart from all the social media apps for Twitter and Facebook) are iBlueSky and Voice Recorder.

1a. iBlueSky Mind Mapping

Every time I have more than 5-6 minutes available, I use iBlueSky for capturing, a nifty mind-mapping app for the iPhone. I start with the post idea as the main node and then draw as many nodes are necessary until I squeeze out all the juice.

After I finish, I send the generated mind map as an email attachment. That’s all.

Mind mapping is my preferred way of capturing ideas. Most of the time, the nodes are becoming blog posts paragraphs and their titles are becoming paragraph titles. It’s like I’m able to create the blueprint of the future article in one run.

1b. iPhone Voice Recorder

But unfortunately, I’m not always able to get 5-6 minutes in the same block (I’m pretty shocked my self while reading this, believe me ) so I’m forced to just use 1 or 2 minutes while waiting in line at the grocery store, for instance.

That’s the time when I quickly fire up the iPhone Voice Recorder and start talking. If you’re not used to talk to a microphone (without having a real person listening on the other side, that is) it will feel strange. Luckily, I worked as a radio anchor for 7 years, so that wasn’t a problem.

What was a problem, though, was how to look like I’m having a conversation and not talking to myself. I confess I wasn’t able to sort this out, yet. Anyway, when I’m in a crowded place and use the Voice Recorder, I try to make it look like I’m having a short conversation with somebody else. I know, it’s silly

2. Computer Capturing Devices

Some of the blog posts ideas are popping out when I’m working at something else, on my laptop. For that, I’m using Quicksilver, the MacJournal shortcut and self-addressed emails.

2a. Quicksilver

Quicksilver is the swiss army knife of Mac. Unfortunately, it seems that the developer is not supporting it anymore, but as it is, is still a very usable app and, if you ask me, a gem. I won’t go into details about the functionality of it, feel free to do a search on my blog abut Quicksilver (yes, I wrote a few articles about it in the past) and you’ll know more.

So, every time I’m in the middle of something and I have an idea, I just hit Ctrl + Space, Quicksilver window comes in, I hit “.” (a dot) and start typing.

After I’m done, I send the text to myself as an email (more on that at point 3b), create a separate text file with it or just put it on the screen with big fonts. Sometimes it helps to look at the idea in big fonts again before saving it.

2b. MacJournal Shortcut

MacJournal also features a keyboard shortcut, so every time I feel my idea will be pretty close to a blog post (as opposed to other types of ideas, like blog post series, guest post ideas, strategies or just interesting bits and pieces) I use this shortcut directly.

Hitting “Alt + Spacebar” brings in this little window and I can safely add the idea directly to my blogging journal. Note that I still need to get back to it and do some mark up around, in order for the idea to qualify for a “Next Posts” journal. If this sounds a little bit fuzzy, just go to the “How To Create And Use A Blogging Setup” paragraph and follow the link for the original post, it will all fall into pieces.

2c. Self-addressed Emails

There are some times where I’m too busy to check all my inboxes during the day. During those times the only inbox I check regularly (apart from my Twitter stream), is my mail inbox. So it kinda makes sense to send self-addressed emails every time I have an idea. Maybe I don’t have time to look into MacJournal, but I will surely look into my mail inbox.

I use whatever comes handy at the moment, if I have the mail client open I will use it, if not, I will use a fast Quicksilver shortcut.

Later on, I will put the snippet into its appropriate place.

How To Empty Your Inboxes

And with that, we’re coming to the next part of my ideas incubator: inbox emptying strategies. An idea you left on a dusted shelf will never become a blog post. So, capturing ideas is useless if you don’t set up an emptying routine, in which you’ll bring all those inboxes to zero, transferring the ideas to a workable setup.

After more than a year of having this into place I established the following routine: I empty the mobile inboxes every week and the desktop inboxes (email and MacJournal, that is) whenever I feel like.

As you can see, the mobile inboxes are the ones that carries around most of the idea traffic, so I have to keep them in good shape. On the desktop, although it sounds I get a little sloppy, I’m not: I get in touch with MacJournal almost daily so every time I see empty spots, I add the necessary meta data to make the blog posts available for writing.

Weekly Reviews

This is a concept borrowed from GTD (I was a big fan of GTD, although lately I’m just using a slightly downsized version of it). Every week I set up between half an hour and an hour and just empty my iPhone Voice Recorder. Since all the mind maps created with iBlueSky are going directly to my mail inbox, there’s no need to do something special about that. Every few months I delete the old mind maps on the iPhone to make room for the new ones, but other than that, iBlueSky doesn’t require special attention.

Emptying the iPhone Voice Recorder is a little slow, because you have to pause an restart the app as you type along. But it’s also very useful. There is a big difference between the ideas sketched as mind maps, and the ideas “spilled” in the Voice Recorder. Sometimes I spend around 15 minutes just to make the idea understandable.

On the other hand, some of the sentences I record live are sometimes left untouched and become some of the best blog post openers or finals. I guess this is called “spontaneity”

How To Create And Use A Blogging Setup

I extensively wrote about how to create and use a blogging setup using MacJournal, so I won’t rehash those ideas here. I will only give you a short description of what a blogging setup is and how to combine it with a blog posts ideas incubator.

A blogging setup is an integrated environment in which you can list all your past and future posts, along with some meta data. You can also write new posts and edit the old ones. Ideally, a blogging environment will let you see all your future posts (or next posts, as I call them) in one place, so you can focus only on them. Basically, on my blogging, I have a list with all my published posts, with the posts I want to write, along with some meta-data which helps me quickly identifying what I have to work on. Some of these posts are in various stages: underway, needs polishing or completed. Think at the WordPress “drafts” concepts on steroids and you’ll have a pretty accurate image of what’s a blogging setup. (If you want to know exactly how I did this with MacJournal you can check out the above blog post.)

Emptying the inboxes should always be done in conjunction with your blogging setup. In other words, you should always put the articles ideas in the first spot where you’re going to use them. Creating separated folders or files somewhere on your hard-disk just to put some “someday / maybe” blog posts ideas is the best way to… kill those ideas. What’s important to know is that once you finished importing an idea into this blogging setup, you should forget about it. Delete it from the device (iPhone Voice Recorder or mail client) and keep the focus only on the blogging setup.

Another thing to be careful about is to do a pre-search on every captured ides, looking for duplicates. Sometimes, especially if I didn’t wrote that idea, I find myself re-capturing it again and again. In other words, I had that idea a few months ago, but never wrote about it, so in my head is still a “new” one, so I capture it. But once I confront the content of my idea inboxes with the blogging setup, I can see that I have a duplicate.

How To Use The Ideas Incubator

Now, let’s put all the pieces together.

1. Make It A Habit

The most important advice: create the habit of doing it. Just be aware that you do have the tools to capture any idea you have at any moment. Fantasizing about that idea, trying to concoct some catchy paragraphs in your head, that alone won’t work. It’s far more better to capture the idea and then liberate you thoughts flow. You can always get back to it when you’ll have more time.

2. Don’t Be Shy

If you created the habit, don’t be shy. As I told you, I still feel rather strange when I’m filling up my voice recorder in a public space, but I think it’s far more important to have that idea shaped than the impression I make on some random people I may never see again.

3. Do Some Master Cleaning

Every once in a while try to purge your blogging setup, getting rid of some clutter. Maybe some ideas are not worth your time anymore, maybe some of them were addressed in other posts. Don’t let the empty number of potential blog posts to fool you. For instance, I have around 100 new potential blog posts available at this moment in my ideas incubator, but the total number of imported ideas was around 250. The 150 extra were eliminated in time. I think the total number of available ideas will vary with your niche and blogging approach, but in my case I saw that going over 100 is not manageable. 100 ideas available at any moment seems like the normal number.

4. Draft The Title First

You should always try to draft your blog post title the moment you’re emptying your inboxes. In my experience, this is the most important thing not only for better remembering what you had in mind, but for the future development of the post. Not to mention the impact on SEO optimization.

5. Be Flexible

You should not be afraid to jump from one idea to another. This may sound simplistic, but in fact it’s a completely different approach from the standard “scheduled” blog posts approach. For instance, if you plan to write this week about motivation, you pick two ideas about motivation and start to write the articles. But half-way you feel like you’re not going to make it, something else looks more appealing at the moment. Well, in this moment you should take a look at your ideas incubator and find something that will make you feel inspired. Yes, you won’t write 2 articles on motivation this week, but you’ll write 2 genuine articles (because you wanted to write about those topics) and you’ll also feel good about it. I’m a huge fan of writing about things that are making you feel good, as opposed to a fixed approach and a strict schedule.

6. Be Fresh

And with that comes the last point: keep a variety of topics. Again, this is going against mainstream which tells you to pick a niche and stick with it. Even if you write on a very narrow niche, don’t be afraid to pick new perspectives on that niche. For instance, I write mainly about personal development, but I do share a lot of so called “technical” advice on a variety of topics: travel, online business, or, like this very post, blogging. All these are in fact facets of the same thing: getting better every day.

***

Keeping a blog posts incubator ideas is one of the most useful things I was able to do to improve my blogging performance. Many beginner bloggers are expecting to have a constant flow of topics and to keep the same writing pace for months, if not for years. From my experience, only an infinitesimal percent of bloggers are keeping their initial writing pace. After a few weeks or months their motivations is starting to decline, many of them are hitting the “writers block” wall and their blogging performance is rapidly decreasing. What’s even worse, is that keeping the same writing pace, without backing it up with some editorial strategy and analysis (which a posts ideas incubator will heavily enforce), will never guarantee your success.

To be honest, a blog posts ideas incubator in itself will never guarantee your success either, but at least you’ll be in a better position for that. It’s like carrying the right stuff in your backpack while preparing to climb the Everest: if you don’t have the right stuff with you, no matter how determined you are, you’ll never reach to the top. But if you have the right tools, AND the right mindset (of you can read more about here) your success is literally guaranteed.

How To Write Compelling Content For Your Blog

The age of blogging galore is over. Just because you have a blog doesn’t mean you’ll automatically have readers too. There was a time when the mere fact of having a blog would bring you an interested and sometimes avid audience. But now the field is too crowded and you really need to stand out if you want to talk to somebody else besides the guy who’s looking at you from the reflection of your monitor.

I’ve written more than 300 articles on this blog by now, and I feel I have only scratched the surface. In today’s article I’ll share some of my insights on how to write constant, quality and engaging content for your blog. Although I primarily blog about personal development, this post won’t be about this specific niche, you can use the advice for whatever blog you have, or intend to have.

Play With Your Words

This is by far the most important and useful tip for writing good content, at least for me. Although I have a constant pool of ideas, I like to write without constraint, to play with the sentences and see where I land. By playing with my words I understand writing in a free form, without being concerned about following the main idea of the post.

You may find yourself drifting really fast from the initial target and write about things that are surprising even for yourself. Or you realize that you’re not so keen about the initial idea and another, much appealing topic is rising. Go for it. Write as you don’t have a deadline or a structured approach. See where you land.

Apart from being a very good antidote to writer’s block, this free form writing approach is almost always a fantastic way of brainstorming new ideas. Every time I start writing an article, I don’t really know if it’s going to be a series, if it’s going to be about the initial topic, or if it will be 400 or 4000 words. But I do know for sure it will be something I would love to write about.

Keep An Incubator Of Ideas

If you’re serious about blogging, you’ll going to be serious about blogging. And by that I mean you’ll have to treat it as a full time occupation. The published articles on your blog will be only the visible part of an iceberg. Under the sea level lies your entire setup. One of the most important parts of this setup is what I call an incubator of ideas.

Your blog will be a reflection of yourself, regardless of the topic you write about. Ideas can come in the most unusual places and at the most unusual times. You have to develop a scaffold for capturing those ideas and keep them in a safe place. The capturing setup is beyond the scope of this article, as it implies a variety of approaches and devices, for now it’s important to know that you have to capture and keep all of your ideas.

I created such a blogging incubator setup using MacJournal and its ability to create smart journals based on a variety of keys (tags, post priority, post status, etc). Even more, I use a GTD paradigm, meaning I isolate the “Next Posts” in a separate journal, so I can always have a fresh focus on them. Feel free to read the entire tutorial.

Make Room For Other Opinions

One of the most forgotten things about blogging is its conversational nature. A blog is made of much more than your own insight. It’s made of your readers comments, the pingbacks, the blogogsphere reactions, and more. If you write in a very sharp way, keeping a rigid approach, chances are that your blog will not become mainstream soon. It may attract a small pool of faithful fans, if you are really good, but not more. In this case, I think you’re using blogging in a therapeutical way which is not inherently good or bad, it will just not become very popular.

Making room for other opinions will allow your readers to express their own insights, to create controversy, to allow freedom of speech and to receive new hints for future posts. I’m not talking only about keeping the comments form opened and answering to your readers as soon as you can, I’m talking about a whole specific approach in your writing.

Even when you’re giving advice or when you’re expressing a very personal point of view, allow yourself the freedom to be challenged on that. Most of the blogs I read on a regular basis have this approach: they present facts or ideas in an open way, giving me a chance to react, to enhance or to disagree openly. And you know what? I can’t wait to come back again to see what happened since my last visit.

Clearly State Your Expertise

No need to be shallow if you’re blogging. No need to brag either, of course. But there is a very important point you should be aware of: make your expertise very transparent. It will not only help your credibility, but it will give your readers a sense of comfort.

If you had a business for 10 years, be transparent on that. I had a business for 10 years, and that gave me the perspective and authority to write several series about how to create and maintain an online business.

But if you started something new, and have no idea about what you’re doing, be also transparent. One of the most read sections in my blog is about the raw food diet. I kept a raw food diet for more than 7 months (it ended once I got back from my trip to Japan) and blogging about it was a fantastic way to learn something new. I wasn’t an expert on that, and I clearly stated that.

Be Consistent

Keep a closed list of topics. That will make your blog easily recognizable. Don’t go too far, don’t spread too much. If you have other interests, the best thing you can do is to create separated blogs for them. Consistency is the key in creating a credible blog brand. Two months ago I decided to migrate 2 of the categories of this blog, namely iPhone and astrology, into their own blogs: iPhoneCounty and AstrologyBits. I will write about iPhone and astrology here, of course, but only when there is a consistent overlap with the main topic of this blog, which is personal development.

Being consistent means also be your most attentive and agile reader. You have to constantly read your blog. Maybe this sounds strange, and it will be strange in the beginning, but once you crossed 50 or 100 articles, you’ll know what I mean.

When I had more than 200 articles, I decided it’s time to automate a little bit this task, and I created a mind map for my blog. I put each post into this mind map, and whenever I want to see my blog from a distance, to have an image of the content topics and their overall weight in the blog, I look at the mind map. There is a separate post about how to put your blog into a mind map (featuring a lot more than just keeping your posts in it), so feel free to read it.

Practice

Nobody will write content for your blog, you’ll have to do it. Of course, you can create a network of blogs, hire people to write and pay them. But in that case you’ll be an entrepreneur, not a blogger. A blogger blogs, period. So, practice your writing, do it often and do it again.

One of the key metrics of a blog is what I call posting speed. It’s basically how many articles you intend to write in a period of time (week or month). This posting speed has a very interesting effect on your writing: it will make it better. The more you write, the better will be at it. There is always a threshold here, you’ll have to experiment a little to see which posting speed is suitable for you. Last year I intended to write 90 articles in 90 days, and I failed miserably after only 17 articles.

But when I decided to have at least 15 articles by month (a practice I follow for about 8 months now) I also created a simple wordpress plugin in order to help me with it. It’s called wordpress blog audit plugin and you can download it from here (among other useful stuff to download). The plugin does a few simple things, one of them being the ability to show if you met or not your posting speed.

***

So, what are YOUR opinions about writing compelling content for your blog? What can you share about this topic? Do you find the advice useful? Do you have something to add? Would love to hear your insights in the comments.

Digital Tools I Use

I want to jot down some stuff about the tools I use to get things done. This would be very sketchy at the beginning, and I’ll try to add more as I go along…

As I already said, I was a Linux guy for about 10 years and I just turned to Mac several months ago. While in Linux there is no such thing such as productivity, but only challenges, in the real world you find yourself in situations where you can actually must to deliver in a specific context. The beauty of Linux is that you can accomplish virtually anything you want with a little bit of tweaking and a little bit of programming and a little bit of neglecting your family . It’s the ideal framework for new trends and for research. And also, incredibly stable.

But Mac, that’s another story. It’s a thing you can actually use to do things, do them with elegance, and also have a life. It’s not suitable for a server, as far as I know. I wouldn’t host on a Mac platform unless I would be forced to. But I would use it every day to write my stuff, get organized and code. Here’s a list of what I use:

Basic Sketching of Ideas

OmniOutliner from OmniGroup. Easy to use. Intuitive. Powerfull. Let me concentrate on the flow of the thoughts. Never used an outliner before, only if I don’t count the extensive use of dashes in vi and other terminal-based editor in Linux, like joe or pico. OmniOutliner come out first after trying several of its competitors.

elaborate brainstorming:

MindManager from MindJet. I was one of the lucky guys that got a free license in a blogger related program and now I’m in love with it. I use MindManager to actually visually draw my thoughts and see how they interact with one eachother. Usually I end up by tossing a project or an idea that sounded so reasonable and eye-catching at the beginning, but once analysed into a mind map proved to be unusable. Once MindManager-ed, meaning once an idea has proven to be viable by passing the mind map exam, it can go further and turn into a project.

Project Planning

OmniPlan from OmniGroup. This tool is new, but is awesome. I already used it for several weeks now and it turned out to be one of the easiest way to actually put my real projects together. Besides the normal GANTT stuff that we all use, there are some gems like: Resource and Calendar view that make my life a lot easier. My projects are usually about web applications and involves a lot of human resources. Using OmniPlan gave me at some point a very strange but refreshing feeling that I can actually know the workload of each of my programmers.

GTD Software

ThinkingRock from an Australian company called Avente Pty. Ltd. It’s a Java implementation, that passed the 1.0 version (at this time they are at 1.2.3 version) and it follows very closely the GTD methodology of David Allen. I tried a lot of applications (including kinkless GTD since I am such a passionate fan of OmniOutliner) but none let me with a clearer mind that ThinkingRock.

Email Reading and Management

Mail.app from Mac Os X. I have only three main folders: Answer ASAP, Waiting For and Reference. The only one that it actually grows is Reference, where I allow myself to have trees of topics and hold related messages there. The Answer ASAP is where I route all the messages from my Inbox that aren’t answered right now and also are not deleted. Once answered, the messages are moved to Reference, or deleted. If one of the message implies another person, I BCC myself, and then move the received message into the Waiting For mailbox.

Web Browsing

Firefox and, from time to time, Safari. I might be biased here since I used Mozilla/Firefox all my life but I feel like Safari still has some work to do at CSS validating and at RSS stuff. But the odds are raising in favor of Safari lately. Also, most of the time, Safari looked a little faster than Firefox. Also, besides several glitches, Safari has a more orthodox JavaScript engine. So far..O

Office

NeoOffice, a port to Mac of OpenOffice, with significantly low rates of crashing… Never had an import problem, but that should be obvious, since NeoOffice is based on OpenOffice. I tend not to use spreadsheets extensively (I found out that I can outline a minimal budget in OmniOutliner Pro if I really need that…) and also read text documents only when I have to.

Coding

Zend Studio 5.0 form Zend. I love the code folding feature, as I have rather large projects and seeing all the functions or DocBlocks at a glance make my life easier. The integration with PHPDocumentator is also a big plus, not to mention the very good code completion. And, surprisingly enough, is not so resource hungry as I thought at the begining.

Every once in a while I surprise myself fiddling into a terminal with some bash commands, but this is just a temporary trauma from my Linux days. I guess.

This setup allows me to have pretty nice level of productivity while letting me enough time to enjoy other, non-work related, activites.

[tags]MAC OS X, productivity, MindManager, Zend, NeoOffice, OmniPlan, OmniOutliner, ThinkingRock[/tags]