Challenge: Write 100 Post Ideas for Your Blog (Today!)

This is a guest post by Oscar Del Ben. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

I’ve just finished writing a list of 100 articles I’d like to publish on my blog at some time. It took me around three hours to get this done but now I have a lot of fresh ideas on paper about what to write. I think everyone who’s serious about blogging should do this every once in a while, at least to see what direction his blog is taking regarding content.

I’m a huge fan of planning ahead and building such a list is definitely the best way I know to plan for your blog. The biggest benefit of doing this is that you’ll have plenty of time to study and research the topics you’ll write about. Depending on your posts frequency, this list could last for as short as two months to as long as one year worth of writing material.

In reality that is only half of the story. In fact writing this list provides multiple advantages. Let’s look at them together.

Let’s start by the simple act of writing down the list. When you are writing, you are dumping out ideas from your brain. Writing is effective because it allow your brain to relax and express your thoughts on paper, which is a solid reference for your ideas. This works even more because a hundred articles is usually enough to provide a challenge for yourself, in fact you’ll really need to use your creativity to build such a long list. If for some reasons writing down a hundred articles is not compelling for you, you might want to write a longer list. Just make sure your articles are unique and that you are not simply rehashing old blog posts.

Another reason to create this list is that your blog should not be your unique end point for your articles. If you want to grow the number of your subscribers and your blog popularity, you should write a lot of guest posts. Now, it can be hard to find the time to write both the articles for your blog, and the guest posts as well, so most of the time you end up procrastinating on this last action. Of course if you know in advance the topic you’ll write about, you will be more likely to take one day off and write five or six quality guest posts to promote your blog.

You’ll also be more likely to respect your blog frequency if you write your articles in advance. Let’s do some math here. If it would usually take one hour to write a good post and you spend one hour every day on writing, in one month you’ll have written at least thirty articles. Now, if the frequency rate on your blog posts is of three articles/week, during that month you’ll have written way more than two entire months of articles in advance. Imagine what you could do with all the free time you’ll have. And this is only for one hour of time per day, which is what I expect you are already spending each day on writing.

Of course you’ll still have new blog posts ideas after you’ll have written such a list. As usual you should track those ideas on paper for later use, and if the article is time sensitive, you’ll easily be able publish it like you would do it now. However, there will be times when you’ll have a big idea. If you follow the method in this article, you’ll be able to spend a lot of time to work on that idea and to turn it into a killer article. In my opinion, you should try to write one killer article every five or six ones to attract new visitors and be featured in social medias and aggregators, but this is another story. However, that is definitely possible by following this method.

Oscar Del Ben is a personal development blogger, programmer and entrepreneur. He likes challenges and he is always looking for ways to

improve and tweak his life. Check out FreeStyleMind, his blog, or subscribe to his RSS feed.