Allow me to introduce Shelley, one of my mother-in-law’s dogs. Sadly she is no longer with us, but we used to love going on long walks in the Lancashire countryside with her, and as long as she didn’t encounter any livestock to chase, or any cowpats to roll in, it was thoroughly enjoyable.

So how does a dog tie in with blogging? Take a look at item 6 in this post http://fairyblogmother.co.uk/6-ways-to-find-inspiration-for-your-blog-posts which suggests taking your dog for a walk to gain inspiration. This has certainly rung true with some people, particularly dog owners, so it is worth highlighting this idea again.

Of course, it needn’t only be walking your dog (though answering to their needs is always a good excuse to down tools and get out for a bit of fresh air). I go running most mornings to try and get a bit fitter and lose some inches, as being a blogger sitting down all day in front of the computer does nothing for my general health.

This is valuable thinking time. It’s not worth forcing yourself to stick to a scheduled thought pattern, as the effort of running up a hill will wipe it clean from your memory. Just let your mind provide its own agenda, and the most amazing things will pop into your head – some good, bad and downright annoying! If you can, find the earliest opportunity to write them down, to prevent the most fantastic idea you’ve ever had from evaporating away.

Of course aerobic exercise will drive oxygen to your brain to help clear it from extraneous material – literally brushing away the cobwebs. “A change of scene is as good as a rest” is a well-known quotation, and sometimes it’s worth putting an idea into your head and then going out to let the subconscious take over. If sleep eludes you because of a good idea, write it down to look at it again in the morning, allowing your brain to rest and work its magic once more.

And the idea of writing draft posts as a dumping ground for your thoughts and observations is another example of clearing the decks to allow your posts to develop and mature away from the computer screen. Not everybody has the ability to ‘just type’, and certainly it has been proven that immediate posting is not always a good idea – notwithstanding spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, but a turn of phrase or a particular word could cause offence or construe to a different meaning.

Hey, you could go running with your dog – good exercise for him too! Let’s hope one day I won’t be regularly disgraced by being passed by two older, fatter ladies happily chatting to each other as they jog along, while I lag behind red faced and puffing…

Fairy Blog Mother

There is one thing that will get your blog’s audience going, and that is your passion for your subject. They may be inspired by your writing, revel in your enthusiasm, absorb your knowledge and be in awe of your expertise, but it will be your passion that makes them come back for more!

It will be your passion that will make you write more posts, which means more new material, and thus more information to entice the search engine spiders to visit to index your posts. This in turn will therefore publicise your blog to a wider audience. Your great content will also encourage more readers to subscribe to your RSS feed, which in turn can be fed into social networking sites, exposing it even further through viral marketing and sharing tactics.

Your blog needs to have a subject you really enjoy writing about. It needs to be as wide as possible to stimulate you to undertake relevant research for your readers, to transform this information into something new, taken from your experiences and expertise. If you find a subject that has been blogged about many times before, don’t be put off; write about your point of view, how you see the situation, what slant you can put on it, what you can recommend or what item you have found that you wish to share. This makes the subject far more interesting to read, rather than purely writing blandly about a much quoted theme.

Eventually posting passionately should become a way of life. You will learn to find new content wherever you are, something will stimulate a possible post, or your brain will be inspired to think in another way to express your thoughts or observations. This then needs to be reverted it into something relevant that will interest your readers, providing them with a passionately inspired post written with them in mind, designed to entertain them suitably to encourage them to either comment or return for more.

Fairy Blog Mother

Many people ask this question – how do you find material to write about in your blog?

Well, once you start blogging, you need to change your mind-set. You need to be able to click onto blogging mode (my family hates it when I do) and you need to gradually train your mind to be always on the look out for possible blogging fodder or to become susceptible to recognising suitable post material wherever you go, what you read, what reacts with you or whatever you bump into.

There’s nothing more irritating than forgetting a brilliant idea, so I like to be able to scribble down the gist of this new concept which pops into my head so that I remember it later and can develop it into a blog post – just that I don’t always get the time to regurgitate or finally write it up!

So where can you find stuff to write about?

1. Look in your in- and out-boxes in your email system; you may be fending off questions at work all the time, and if you think you’ve managed to write a successful or relevant reply to a particular query, why not rewrite it as a post so that more people can benefit from your wisdom?

2. Subscribe to a myriad of blogs within your industry; reading what other people write about in similar subjected blogs as you should not be a daunting experience, you should derive inspiration and write about the same things in your own style, taking advantage in the fact that that’s what people are writing about at the moment – but remember, plagiarism is not advised under any circumstances.

3. Set up Google Alerts to receive prompts from other blog; this is another way to how you accomplish the second point, and certainly you’ll find out daily the main projects and topics that are successfully stimulating the search engines. Being aware of hot news and commenting on it yourself will not only draw attention to you, but show you are riding the wave of ‘now’.

4. Be vigilant on social networking sites; this is another way of finding out what’s happening, and I use LinkedIn to generate new content by answering Questions on my particular subjects and responding to discussions on the Groups I follow (this is how I got the idea for this post). Of course there are lots of other sites specifically created to watch and recommend other blogs, such as Digg and StumbleUpon, where there will be lots of new material to read, learn, respond to and share with others.

5. Researching which keywords are ‘a la mode’ right now; for Search Engine Optimisation to be truly effective, you need to find out the most effective and popular keywords or keyphrases that the search engines are responding to at this moment. Leave it any later and they will become yesterday’s news, and you will have missed the boat. Once you’ve found your likely keyword, base your blog post about it for the most effective results, but don’t saturate your post with more than 10% or you will turn off both spiders and human readers.

6. Go out for a nice walk with the dog to let the creative juices flow; there is always something to be said for a change of scene. Quite a lot of stuff outside your place of work will stimulate new ideas, and sleeping on a problem and allowing your subconscious to work overnight will result in new material in the morning. I don’t expect you go to out and start talking to trees and flowers, but even the process of speaking your ideas into a dictaphone or scribbling down all your ideas quickly in a notebook may be enough to generate the perfect post you are looking for.