Business Blogging

Tips to Help You Barrel Through Writer’s Block

It’s inevitable. Everyone hits the wall. Whether you’ve been blogging ten weeks, ten minutes, or ten months, eventually you’ll find yourself with absolutely nothing to say. Or so you think.

So what in the world do you do when you’re stumped?

1- Talk about what you’ve already talked about

Pick a topic you’ve gone over before and give it some spin.

Try a new angle, like playing devil’s advocate. For example, if you are a search engine journalist, and last week your position was that most mainstream sites need Google traffic to survive, try proving your point from the “con” perspective, instead of the “pro” position.

There are dozens of ways to write about the same thing. By putting your point another way, you might give someone in your audience what a client of mine referred to as an “Ah-ha!” moment. That's when they realize the true value of the items for sale at your site to them and their business.

2- Talk about what someone else is talking about

If you want to have a popular blog, find other bloggers in similar areas, and talk about what they said in their posts. Friendly debate can often spark the soap-opera like drama that will have both your audiences visiting both blogs to see what “the other fella” had to say.

As an added bonus, if both of you are using Trackback in your blogs, you’ve got yourself a mini-link party that other people who are speaking on similar topics will want to join..

3- Have yourself a good rant
The intimate nature and voice of blogs lends itself well to the opinionated, angry ramble. But as a professional, don’t let yourself get too unfocused, and remember to back up your opinion with facts.

4- Feature someone, something or somewhere
I like to call mine “of the Day”.
As I zip around the Net conducting my business and research, if my attention is called to a resource or tool that my audience might find useful, I hit my blog bookmarklet and save that bad boy for later.

Then when I get too busy for a full blown tip, I’ll crown the resource, feed, tool, download or freebie the featured “Deal of the Day”, changing the word deal to something else more appropriate as needed.

After a while, my audience started to look for it as a feature, as opposed to being upset at the interruption in my mad, mad rambles.

5- Let someone else talk for a change

Invite a guest blogger, or post an article that offers free reprint rights, the same way you would in a newsletter. Of course you want to leave the resource box intact, or let the guest promote their site, which brings me to the most common complaint about this tactic.

“But I don’t want to send people away from my site.”

Guess what? You’ll never believe what I found out. Ready?

In a recent startling discovery, I’ve found that 100% of my visitors eventually turn off their computers or take otherwise drastic measures that cause them to leave my site. Apparently this is beyond prevention, though you can stall them for hours sometimes with good content.

Of course you don’t want to send them on their way prematurely, but if you’re a good blogger, and have done what you can to make sure they sign up to your blog email updates or site feed, they’ll be back. Just be sure that you’re giving them a good enough reason.

In the meantime, since they’re going to leave anyway, it might as well be somewhere that gives you some direct or in-direct benefit.