Blogging Secrets: Where Do Ideas Come From?

The reason many people give for not blogging is they are afraid they will run out of things to post about. This assumed that a blogger must post at least once a day to be worthy of the name, which is demonstrably false, but it also assumes that every idea for a post must spring up fresh from the blogger’s own mind with no help whatsoever. Again, this is simply not true.

The truth is, it is not stealing to get your ideas from what others have written. Obviously, copying someone else’s work and posting it as if it were your own is out and out plagiarism, but getting the spark of an idea from another’s writing is perfectly acceptable.

What tends to happen when you read and skim through the news and RSS feeds is, a bulb lights up when what you’re reading triggers an aha moment in your mind. Your mind is great at recognizing patterns. That’s what a human brain does. As you read, your brain is searching for patterns among your own knowledge and the new knowledge being assimilated as you read. The more relevant knowledge there is to work with, the more patterns there will be to find.

There are times when ideas do seem to pop into my head from out of the ether, and I am always thankful when that happens, but even then the ideas still came from my accumulated knowledge, they just took a bit longer to gel.

So where do bloggers get their ideas? From reading other bloggers, from reading the news, from reading books, from talking to people; basically wherever they can get relevant knowledge.

I have several sources for my blogging ideas. First I skim through hundreds of RSS feeds using FeedDemon. I like the way FeedDemon organizes my feeds. Once I’ve gone through each sites new feeds, I mark them all as read and move to the next batch. Sometimes I hit the jackpot very quickly, sometimes I don’t find anything that meets my standards. If that happens, I move on to a different blog topic (I have 6 blogs).

My second set of sources is web sites that don’t have feeds. I go there directly and browse for something interesting and useful to my readers.

Sometimes I have to stumble around with StumbleUpon, search in Digg, etc. Sometimes I have to give it up for an hour or so and come back later. Somehow, I end up with what I judge to be decent ideas. Then I start writing, crafting my posts as I create them.

That’s just how I do it. I’m sure others have their own ways of getting it done. And getting it done is what’s ultimately important.

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