How do you find new post ideas?

[BillionaireWoman]

I tend to get ideas from my daily life. They kind of just come to me. The downside to this method is that they aren't always relevant to my audience..

I get lots of email and those tend to give me ideas for posts, even if I don't fully disclose the content of their email.

Like Remarkablogger said, it's great to be inspiring my comments on your blog. I've written posts based on comments and they have done very well.

I also keep a notebook handy for whenever inspiration strikes!

[remarkablogger]

Originally Posted by BillionaireWoman

I also keep a notebook handy for whenever inspiration strikes!

Keeping a notebook is a great idea, and there are so many ways we can do it now: Jott.com, evernote.com, Google Notebook, Microsoft OneNote, and good ol' DeadTree 1.0.

[starshard0]

I'm really bad at coming up with post ideas, since nothing much of consequence happens in my life. I did an article recently that was a brief overview (in the loosest sense of the word) of personal finance and retirement planning. I'm thinking for next week doing something about politics, or maybe video games.

[MoneySaver101]

I have an ongoing list of articles to write. The ideas just come to me. I have a personal finance blog, so the ideas come to me when I'm shopping, driving, pumping gas, watching television, etc...

I also just started a new article series called Freebie Fridays. So I research free offers to make that weekly post, in addition to whatever ideas pop into my head for other articles during the week.

[remarkablogger]

Originally Posted by starshard0

I'm really bad at coming up with post ideas, since nothing much of consequence happens in my life. I did an article recently that was a brief overview (in the loosest sense of the word) of personal finance and retirement planning. I'm thinking for next week doing something about politics, or maybe video games.

Everybody learns at their own pace, but a little help can really shorten the learning curve a lot.

Think about the blogs you like to read: are they just random posts on different ideas and not about anything in particular? Most likely, they're not. Most likely, blogs you like to read are very focused in their topic or topics.

Narrowing your blog subject matter down to a niche actually makes it easier to come up with topics, not harder.

Another characteristic of highly successful blogs is that they're written by interesting people who do have "something of consequence" happening in their lives. What has always been true for writing over the years is also true for blogging: the best writing comes from life experience. If you want have something worth writing about, do something worth writing about or at least write about other people who are doing something worth writing about.

When you're writing about personal finance, you have a goldmine of material: your own experiments in personal finance! What worked, what didn't, what to watch out for, etc.

[the weakonomist]

I focus on current events. The big news this week is AIG and the Dow, so I'm working on a post about AIG. Like others here, I have a number of segments I regularly do.

My most recent is the Weakonomics Tour of the Country, which is an economic summary of each state in order of admittance into the union. I'm working on Massachusetts right now.