There are plenty of websites suggesting you write reviews, how-to guides, answer questions, ask your readers questions, expand, update, or otherwise reuse previously released content, etc. 

It’s all great advice, however you do unfortunately need a topic to write about before you can apply any of these techniques. Writing content is the easy part — coming up with that idea of what to write about is a lot harder for most people. Many people haven’t done themselves any favors when blogging..

Take me for example — I started blogging about 4 letter .com domain names way back in November 2007. It’s an interesting topic for those invested in that domain name market, however there’s only so much material out there and after about 6 months of blogging, I really couldn’t come up with much in the way of advice on investing in 4 letter .coms besides reporting on new sales and analyzing reported sales data. Since then, I’ve diversified my blogging to contain anything related to domain names — be it tips on buying and selling domains or on developing and monetizing domains. I still write about 4 letter .coms when there’s something newsworthy to mention, however I now no longer have to stress about coming up with content. The broader the topic you choose to build your website around, the easier it will be to come up with content for it. As I’ve discussed in the past however, going with broad topics for your website means you’ll be up against some stiff competition and probably isn’t the right way to go if you plan on monetizing your website or building it up into an authority on it’s subject matter. With a broader range of topics, most advertisers will experience a lower conversion rate, unless they sell a broad range of products (eg. GoDaddy).

My favorite sources of inspiration for future posts include:

• About.com
• Alltop
• Blog Catalog
• Business Wire
• Cnet
• Delicious
• Digg
• DN Journal
• Domaining.com
• EzineArticles
• Forums (for this site: Namepros, DN Forum, and Domain State)
• Google AdWords Keyword Tool
• Google Alerts
• Google Blog Search
• Google Groups
• Google News
• Keyword Discovery
• Mashable
• Other blogs in different but still related niches (eg. for this site: JohnChow.com or ShoeMoney)
• popurls
• PR Newswire
• PR Web
• Reddit
• Techmeme
• Technorati
• StumbleUpon
• Tweetmeme
• Twitter Search
• Twitter tweets
• Wall Street Journal
• Wikipedia
• Wordtracker
• Yahoo Answers
• Yahoo Buzz
• Yahoo News
• ZDNet

We all have our good days and our bad days — knowing that, it’s wise to keep a few pages of content written for those days when you’re struggling to come up with content. Breaking your post frequency every once in awhile isn’t a big deal. My page views on this blog often go up when I occasionally don’t post for a day or two – visitors are reading content they didn’t have time to read previously.

Related posts:

1. Any Topics You’d Like Covered?
2. Become a Guest Blogger
3. Social Media’s Effect on Search Engines