How to Get Five Great Ideas For Blogs In Ten Minutes

Go from blog zero to blog hero in your coffee break

Do you find it hard finding subjects to write about?

Well don’t worry, you’re not alone. It’s no surprise that the most often asked question to authors at book festivals is, “Where do you get your ideas from?”

So I’m going to share with you a very simple technique for generating ideas. It only takes ten minutes and requires no thinking or preparation beforehand.

But first I want to give you a bit of background about why it’s hard to come up with ideas and why this is such a good technique.

The first problem is, when you sit down and feel like you can’t think of anything, you are actually thinking of something. You’re thinking, “what would people be interested in?” or “What would be a good subject for a blog?” By doing this, your putting pressure on yourself. So this is the first rule of having good ideas. Don’t try to have good ideas.

Also, you only know if an idea is any good if you’ve got something to compare it to. As Linus Pauling the Nobel Prize winning chemist said, “the best way to get good ideas is to have lots of ideas and then throw away the bad ones.”

And don’t feel you have to be a great writer either. You don’t have to write beautifully, you just have to have a good idea that people are interested in finding out more about.  Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code has been criticised for being really badly written but it’s sold 80 million copies. Why? Because people want to find out what happens. They don’t care about the quality of the writing.

It’s the same with a blog. If you’ve got an interesting story about your product or service people will want to read it. The hard part is getting these ideas out of your head and onto paper.

The trick is to bypass your critical, conscious mind and write without thinking. And to do this, you need to focus on quantity over quality. Your job is just to churn out ideas and not worry about whether they are good or not. The irony is, the less you worry about quality, the better the ideas will be.

I have run workshops where people have worked on a problem and written all their ideas on a wall until they couldn’t think of anything else. I then said they had five minutes and had to think of five more ideas. It didn’t matter how stupid they were, they just had to be five relevant ideas.

By taking away the pressure of trying to think of ‘good’ ideas, they all managed to come up with another five ideas. And you know what, the best ideas on the wall were from all those last five minutes.

You know your subject matter inside-out, all you need to do is bypass your inner critic to tap into that knowledge.

So, get ten post-it notes, a pen and give yourself ten minutes to come up with ten ideas. Why not try setting your timer for five minutes, so you know when you’re half way through. The more pressure and so the less time you have to think, the better.

When you’ve finished, it’s time to be critical and judge the ideas. And I guarantee you, there will be at least five ideas there that will make good blogs.

On your marks, get set…go!