Tag: blog posts

Asking for Writing Topics

When it comes to writing blog posts and email broadcasts, I write best reactively.

In a previous post, I talked about how to generate lots of writing ideas. That’s all well and good because I think those will be fun to write and interest people. And, in addition to coming up with ideas on my own, I find that some of my best stuff comes based off of another person’s question.

Question Mark

A few things can happen when I receive a question:

  1. I might not think the question is broad enough to be interesting to more than the person asking about it. Or it is just a bad question (yes, they do exist). In this case I’ll answer individually or not. But these cases are actually in the minority.
  2. I know the answer to the question and it is worth posting about. The question sends my mind off in a direction and the words just flow from my fingertips. The more you know a topic, the better you’ll be able to do this. This is wonderful because it may not be a topic I would have thought of myself. Still, if someone is asking it, probably lots of people are thinking the same things.
  3. I don’t know the answer to the question, and it is still worth posting about. In these cases, if it holds my interest, I’ll have to do some more research to give it a good answer. These posts take more time, but I learn as I go along so it is often worth it.

Although this happens more often than not with a question, it can also happen with comments. Those too can send me off in writing. Maybe to fill in more details. Maybe because I disagree with what was said. Maybe it just sends me off on a tangent.

You can see plenty of examples of these on my other sites. Some good recent examples include:

Just recently I did this in regards to topics for filming Youtube videos. It works much the same there.

On this note, what are your questions? I want to do the same thing here at LoganChristopher.com based on what YOU want to read about. Ask me anything that doesn’t have to do with health and fitness. (I may answer those things, but it will be at the other websites.) Questions on business. Questions on money. Questions on productivity. Questions on writing. Questions about how to be an awesome human being. Whatever you want to know, ask away…

Along with this I always like to put this disclaimer. There are no guarantees that I’ll answer your question.  And it probably won’t be individually but instead here in a future post. But if it fits in the categories 2 or 3 above, there is a good chance I will answer it. Please post your questions below…

How to Generate Lots of Writing Ideas

In my previous post, I mentioned a long list of topics that I plan to write about here.

But a topic does not necessarily help you to write a blog post (or whatever else you’re writing). A topic is great for a book, but even then you’ll have to narrow it down in order to come up with a structure.

Topics need to be narrowed down. So as I set out today to write the second blog post here I had to come up with more specific ideas.

I’m a huge proponent of Trello. I use it for managing projects and my various teams…but I also use it for managing myself. A Trello board makes a great place to capture ideas.

I created a new board called LC Ideas, and I dropped that laundry list of topics into one column titled Topics.

Then I created a second column for Ideas.

Trello Writing Ideas List

Some people think that coming up with ideas is hard. I beg to differ. Anyone that can’t come up with ideas, just hasn’t practiced it enough. In fact, ideas are easy. Ideas don’t stop coming. And I don’t think you need to be particular creative in order for that to be true, just practiced.

An idea I heard about from James Altucher is to think of ten ideas about some topic, and do this as an exercise each day. Usually the first five or six ideas are easy, but you need to stretch for the final few. 

It’s a really good exercise. I could go down each of my topics in turn and generate ten specific post ideas for each one.

But I didn’t do that here…at least not yet.

Just looking at the list, I started to come up with specific ideas.

Now, to be honest some of the things came up could be topics in and of themselves, or at least a multi-part series of posts. Still, some were very specific posts in my ind.

On my 12th idea I happened on this one, i.e. what became this post. Why not share exactly what I’m doing? And so I did.

Here’s the great thing about Trello. I’ll be continuing to use this board for some time now. Any time a great idea pops into my head about something to write here, I’ll save it in this spot.