Herself’s Webtools

So I have 7 blogs I’m running right now. They all began mid to late January and at about the end of 3 months I found I was spending more time looking for topics to discuss than I was writing. Well this will never do I’m thinking. I have about 5 blogs about blogging I follow and one of them said that after 90 days you run out of things to say. Ah, well at least I am not alone. So how do you break out of that 90 slump?

1) Leave the house and do something.

2) Do something new. If you are writing about plants, buy some new plants, attend a plant show. Attend a talk on your blog subject. All cities have tons of people out giving free talks. Do something different with the plants you have. Experiment.

3) Work one of your other hobbies into your blog. I was spending a bunch of time learning how to process digital photos and realized this might be useful information for people putting together websites and blogs. Forthwith came several Gimp how to entries on this blog.

4) If you are looking for information on how to do something and can’t find it, you can bet no one else can find it either. Figure it out and post directions. That is where the webcam how-to and social book mark entries came to be. The nice thing about entries like that is you can go back to all the forums you went to looking for an answer no one had and post a link back to your how-to.

5) Take a quick scan at Digg and Technorati and see what is popular. What are people talking about? Then write a better, more informative blog entry than any you ran across on the subject.

6) Check the news for interesting news stories on your blog topic. Summarize the news story, then dig up some more background information and flesh it out some. Put links in for readers who want more in depth information on the story.

7) Check the library for pre-internet books on your blog subject. What’s old is new, everything cycles around. You’ll get some good ideas from the books. Who knew ‘decorating with house plants’ was a big thing in the 1970s. I came up with about a dozen entries after going through some house plant books from the 1970s.

Take a break. If you are writing 5 entries a week for 7 blogs you have no time to learn new things. Back off a little on posting if it doesn’t leave enough time to get out and do what you are blogging about.

9) Write a week ahead. That way you have some entries you can post if you get stuck. Taking the pressure off will help keep you from getting writer’s block.

10) Leave the house. { Some things bear repeating. }