Tips for blogging

It is not always easy to come up with topics to blog about.

• When I was in the Black Poet Society at Michigan State University, we often had people (including myself) that would go through periods of writers block.
• At the beginning of 2011, I decided I would try to write a blog post per day and it wasn’t easy to think of topics.

There are a few strategies for writing that I have come to rely upon.

1. As I am going through my day, I like to keep a small piece of paper handy for me to jot down ideas that pop up. These are helpful because without writing them down, I am likely to forget them and never revisit them. They don’t have to be perfect topics, but they plant a seed that can grow to a full blog post.
2. WordPress.com has built-in visitor statistics. These are useful to see how your visitors have landed on your blog. Once in a while I will see a user’s search query who was looking for something that I didn’t provide. If the topic is interesting, I might add it to my list.
3. The third and most important strategy is to narrow down your topics. When presented with less choice, it is easier to make a decision. We used this strategy in our poetry workshops, and there is no reason that it can’t be used for blogging. Don’t think, “What would be something cool to write about?” Instead, find a tangible object in your house and think about what you can write based on that object. This drastically narrows the scope, and makes creativity blossom.