What To Write About In Your Blog, Newsletter Or Ezine

As you market your book, products or services, you may have decided to create a blog. When you start out, you are full of ideas to write about. The first few months are wonderful. But then you start to wonder, "What am I going to write about tomorrow?" And if you started off with a daily blog, you can quickly start to worry. If this sounds like you, I would like to offer a few ideas that fit into almost any blog, newsletter or ezine that may help you discover topic ideas that can keep you busy writing for years to come.

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So, what about those blog topics? Rather than think about specific topics to write about each day, I recommend that you think about categories to write about. When you think about categories, it's a lot easier to brainstorm ideas. And if you run cold in one category, you may feel hot in another category. Consider these ideas:

• How-To Posts- People often look for tutorials on how to do something. You can give step-by-step instructions on how to do just about anything. I have written these types of posts on how to use simple HTML when you comment on a post, how to create free banners and ad boxes for your website, how to create favicons for your web page, and many others. For ideas on how-to topics, browse YouTube. Many of those videos are how-to videos and can give you a wealth of ideas to write about in your posts.
  
  
• Reviews- These are very popular posts for a couple of reasons. One, when someone is looking to make a purchase, they want to know what others think of the product before they make a purchase decision. Two, reviews can introduce people to new resources they did not know existed. Once you start adding reviews to your lineup, you will probably get people contacting you asking that you consider doing a review on their product.
  
  
• Commentaries- Sometimes you read a news event or read another blog post and you have something to add to the conversation. Instead of simply commenting on the post, why not add your voice via your own blog entry? You can link back to the original post that got you thinking and in many cases, you can create a great dialog with may authors who are posting on the subject.
  
  
• Guest Posts- Dana Lynn Smith has a wonderful post that she did on this blog yesterday talking about the benefits of having guests write posts for you entitled, Enhance Your Blog and Ezine with Guest Posts. Take a look it for some great ideas, but suffice it to say for this post that if you set up guest authors on a weekly basis, you can have 20% of your posts taken care of if you do a daily blog (M-F).
  
  
• Series- Sometimes you have a big topic. You can break them down into a series of posts. This will do a couple of things for you. One, it will give you a short term schedule filler as you schedule your series out. Two, series can be a great way to keep people coming back to get "the rest of the story". Once people invest themselves in story, they generally want to see it through. Series can be as short as a two-parter to as long as you want them to be. Be careful not to burn people out. A 99 part series on how to cook meatloaf may sound appetizing for a few days, but it soon may leave your readers' palate looking for something different before the series ends.
  

Hopefully, these categories will spark some ideas for you. As you come up with ideas, write them down, even of you decide not to use them right away. It's amazing how quickly a great idea can turn into vapors and disappear if you don't record them. With a little brainstorming, you will be surprised at how quickly you will have a full schedule planned out for your blog, newsletters or esines for a long time to come.

Tony Eldridge