The Best Weapon for Deciding What to Write About

If you always have a list of blog post ideas with at least 50 items on it, you’ll never sit down at your desk and not know what to write about.

- [[John Sonmez]]

Contents

• Introduction
• The Secret Weapon - A Simple List

Introduction

Many software developers, and wanna-be-bloggers in general, often don’t make any progress on their blog, because they can’t decide what to write about. There is a misconception that you have to be an excellent writer and an expert in a topic area in order to write a blog post. In reality, all you need to write a blog post is an idea and an opinion. Unless you are a completely monotone robot, I’m pretty sure you have an opinion, but you may be a bit short on ideas. Don’t worry. The point is, you need ideas, and lots of them.

So, how do you get ideas? Well, it’s pretty simple, you brainstorm.

You’ll have a lot easier time coming up with blog post ideas for your blog if you dedicate some time to thinking of them rather than hmm’ing and haw’ing on the spot trying to think of them.

The Secret Weapon - A Simple List

The secret weapon is simply a list.

Use your tool of choice, be it Trello, Todoist, Workflowy, Obsidian, a simple .txt or markdown note, or just plain ol’ reliable paper to create and maintain an ongoing list of blog post topics and ideas.

The catch is that the list needs depth and therefore I recommend always keeping at least 30 items on it. Ideally you want the list to be 50 or more ideas long.

If you can look at that list and you can’t come up with at least 50 blog post ideas, then maybe you’ve picked the wrong theme for your blog.

Brainstorming Tips

Just like with the GTD Mindsweep, do not be picky when creating your ideas list - quantity is more important than quality here.

Let the ideas flow. It does not matter if they are good or not, some of the best ideas and biggest winners are based off of ideas that I first felt were no good.

Next Steps

After mastering the art of brainstorming and maintaining a list of blog post topics and ideas, the next step moving forward is Committing to Consistency with Your Blog.