How To Blog Everyday

Chris Bro­gan lists down how he writes blog posts every­day. I’ve per­son­ally found it dif­fi­cult to do that, since inspi­ra­tion is some­thing that does not come auto­mat­i­cally for me (or for any­body else I think!), but thanks to EVERNOTE (which gives me the abil­ity to clip notes when­ever I read some­thing great on the net), and the WORDPRESS future post­ing, which allows me to write on Sat­ur­days, when I’m rel­a­tively free, and then post auto­mat­i­cally every week­day, it seems like I get to write posts everyday.

So how do you write almost every­day? Here are some suggestions:

1. Read some­thing new every day. Need a start­ing point? Try All­top. (Hint: read some­thing out­side your par­tic­u­lar cir­cle to get new thoughts).
2. Talk with peo­ple every day. I get many of my topic ideas from ques­tions peo­ple pose to me, or through conversations.
3. Write down titles and topic ideas in a notepad file.
4. Main­tain a healthy book­mark­ing and revis­it­ing habit. I use Deli​cious​.com [NOTE: I use the very effec­tive and much improved INSTAPAPER, to save pages I want to read later on.
5. Find 20–40 min­utes in every day to sit still and type.
6. Fol­low an easy frame­work. Here are 27 blog­ging secrets to start you on what I mean.
7. Get the post up fast, not per­fect. You can edit if you have to, later. Per­fec­tion­ism kills good habits.
8. Dis­sect other people’s posts to under­stand what makes them tick. The more you under­stand HOW they write, the more you can take the best parts of it into how you write. (hint, my 27 blog­ging secrets post gives you my patterns.)
9. Find use­ful and inter­est­ing pic­tures. I use Flickr pho­tos licensed under Cre­ative com­mons for most of my pho­tos. This helps me some­times get a great photo for a post I already have in mind, but it also gives me post mate­r­ial sometimes.
10. Think about what your cus­tomers and prospects need. I write from the per­spec­tive of the com­mu­ni­ties I serve. Every post is aimed at some­thing I believe will be help­ful to my com­mu­nity in some form or another. This focus takes some weight off my wor­ries about what I should write about or not. I write about what my com­mu­nity needs.
11. Mix things up by some­times blog­ging on paper first.
12. Mix things up by writ­ing guest posts for sites that aren’t like yours. This gives your mind new for­mats to think about. I did this recently as part of a project and I loved it.
13. Mix things up by chang­ing the lengths of your posts: some long, some brief. Learn what makes an impact how.
14. Never worry about throw­ing up the occa­sional “best of” post, once you get enough material.

It’s not easy, but once you develop the habits, they stick with you.