8 Tips To Create Your Content and Beat Writer’s Block

To make money online, you need traffic. To get traffic, you need content. Now where have you heard about this before? Needless to say that content is the most important part of all your blogging efforts, specially if you want to monetize your blog or blogging for business. However, come a time when the need of creating content meets writer’s block. Not sure what to write, not sure where to start, and you keep thinking and thinking and nothing, nada, zero. You just can not get that magic click of what to write next.

What can you do to beat writer’s block?
If occasionally you suffer from the Writer’s Block Syndrome (WBS), sometimes, the best thing to do is just have several cups of coffee (beer if you prefer), blog hop, make comments, have fun Twittering, and clear your mind. But hey, you are stubborn and determined to write something. You are afraid that you are lagging behind your competitors and you must post an article, at the risk of killing your blog. Should this be the case, here are some tips and tricks to help you source content for new articles:

1. Your old articles: These will include your archives of articles that you have published in the past. It is very easy to go through them and If you have been blogging for a while, chances are, you have written some articles that needs updating. Review some of your older posts and see whether there are outdated information where you can provide a newer or fresher version of the events.

2. Comments: Check your comments and look for possible hints to prepare for your next article. Sometimes people leave questions and even suggestions that are worth exploiting. What better article to write than those that your own readers suggest?

3. In the mood: Contrary to writer’s block, there are days that you are on the roll. Take advantage of that vitamin and write as many posts as you can. Make them short (250 – 400 words) and schedule them for publishing. Those days can easily rack 3 – 5 articles in a snap.

4. “Top 7” or “List of” Articles: Everyone likes content they can read very fast. Why not create top 7 lists (or any number of “Top” things) related to your area of expertise. You can begin by creating a headline such as “Top 7 Blogging Tips For The Newbies” and then number the list from 1-7. Come up with a sub-headline for each tip and then do (1) paragraph describing the tip. You’ll find these are easy to produce and crank out several of them per week.

5. Forum Posts: If you belong to a few forums that you might call yourself a “resident expert” on, chances are that you have made forum posts that can be easily converted to a blog post. All of your old forum posts that are greater than 250 words in length can be a source for great new articles that you can put into distribution and create more traffic.

6. Keyword Research: Google Insight or any keyword research tool can discover topics that people are currently searching for that can be related to your area of expertise. Use this as a springboard to launch another article, each related to answering or providing short tips on how to solve or get more out of the keywords they searched for.

7. Free Articles: GoArticles and Ezine are two of the best source for quality articles. This is one of the reasons why article marketing is great for your link building campaign. Did you know that you are allowed to reprint articles from these directories? These directories have strict reprint guidelines and provided you follow them, there is no problem to publish them in your blog. Some of these guidelines include, but are not limited to, not changing the article in any way, not removing any links, including article source (normally the bio of the author), etc. You get content and the author gets a backlink. Just remember to use this technique only when you have WBS, and do not make it a habit.

Now, you might be asking, will I not get penalized for having duplicate content? Let me ask you the contrary. I submit my articles to at least three or four directories. They are all exactly the same as I am the original author (no problem there). Now, is that article a duplicate content? Ezine will never publish a non original content. They will allow your article to get published provided you prove it to them that the original is yours and you must give them the source (generally your own blog). There are also other pertinent information regarding the duplicate content taboo, which I recommend you reading.

8. Writing To Exhale: Jump over to Jan Geronimo’s blog and read 7 Tips to Keep You from Killing Your Own Blog and How I Beat Writer’s Block. You will find these posts very interesting as proven with the massive amount of comments both got. It was also a source for writing this post:)

There you go. I wrote this post precisely because I had this syndrome the last couple of days. I have to admit that it is a horrible feeling, wanting to write something, have a lot of ideas, and yet that keyboard is just starring at you waiting for something to happen:) What about you? Have you suffered this syndrome before? What did you do to beat it?