Have you ever struggled with finding ideas for blog postings? It’s not uncommon. Eventually, you can cover the same ground that you did before, which is more than likely, especially if you’re writing on a regular basis. Still, the marvelous thing about life–even work life–is that it’s constantly changing, as are your thoughts about it. And while I’ve covered this topic before (as recently as a year ago, in fact), there’s always something new to say just because life changes who I am and how I respond to it. 

The Basis for Any Content-Producing Site: Ideas

Whether you’ve just started a blog or you’ve been writing on a regular schedule for years, you know that ideas fuel your content and keep it moving forward. They don’t necessarily have to be your ideas to begin with: there could be someone out there sharing an opinion you’ve never encountered before to which you care to react.

And you do have opinions, yes? An aim or emphasis for your blog? A target audience in mind? Rather than be the office wise guy and constantly share my thoughts/feelings about the world aloud at the water cooler, I type them on the computer and share them with you fine folks. Lucky you. But you’re human, too, and you are going to have opinions. They might or might not coincide with the majority of practitioners in your industry or line of work, and that’s okay (assuming you can provide a decent rationale). If everyone had the same opinions, there wouldn’t be much need for blogs or editorials, would there?

You just need to have confidence that your opinions have value and that they should be shared with others. It’s not ego if you’re making a worthwhile contribution.

Have the Circumstances Changed?

Work, like life, has rhythms to it. You might operate on a monthly schedule, where specific deliverables or tasks are performed with predictable regularity. If you’re delivering reports, no two months are exactly alike because your organization is performing different tasks or responding to different activities in the world around it.

If you’re 100% freelance and your customers, tasks, and content vary by the month, week, or day, that set of circumstances is going to affect what you write about.

And yes, that magic word pandemic has likely changed your work routines, even if you’re a work-from-home person like me. It might affect the amount of work you’re doing…it might affect the pace…or it might affect how you interact with your coworkers. Certainly you can find things to say about the situation from your point of view, yes?

Have You Changed?

As time goes by, our life circumstances change: we get new jobs or a new home or new domestic circumstance (significant other, offspring, pets, or departure of same). We experience some great or tragic event that causes us to change our perspective on what’s important to us. You might find that a strongly held opinion of yours on a given topic has shifted since you last wrote about it. You might have made mistakes that cause you to adjust your thinking–you can acknowledge the change and write about that.

In the end, your blog is about you and your reactions to some specific part of the world that holds your interest. As long as your topic is interesting to you, you have some level of expertise, and you have a lot to say about it, you’ll rarely lack for material. And while there is plenty out there in the world to react to or think about, you shouldn’t neglect what’s happening in your own mind. There’s plenty of material to be found there, too.

Happy writing!