Hair of the Blog: Remedies for Idea Hangovers

How do you keep up with a blog when you are suffering from Blog Hangover?  Has blogging started to be more work than fun?  Has it become painful to develop interesting ideas? Do you feel disinterested, tired, and in need of hair of the blog?

First, whether you are blogging once a week or twice a month, keep to your schedule. If you have established faithful readers, respect their time and loyalty.  Give them something to anticipate in your next blog post. Keep their interest.  If you don’t keep to your promised schedule, you run the risk of losing them and having to attract a new readership from scratch.

Also, the more you post, the better your Search Engine Optimization (SEO). With each post, the Internet builds a portfolio of your work and your SEO increases.  When people search the Internet for a topic you have written, the chance that your work will show on their first page of searches increases.  Writing sporadically only hurts your reliability and your SEO.

Secondly, blog topics depend on the purpose of your blog, and the purpose of your blog defines its genre. Look at all its facets and stick to that. A political blog is different from a cooking blog, a Mommy blog, or an author’s blog. Focus on why you blog.  What overall product or pronouncement are you selling? 

For instance, my blog is about a writer of boomer age struggling to find her writer’s voice. It is about her experiences, her writing, and about the books she reads.  I am not selling anything, other than myself, so I alternate blogs about these three subjects. It gives me a variety of latitude.

Thirdly, I get inspiration from many places. I search calendars and approaching holidays.  I read newspapers, magazines, and online news sources.  I try and keep abreast of the latest trends, fads, and controversies.  I keep my eyes and ears open to the world around me as I travel, reading billboard signs and listening to conversations and radio shows. I read voraciously and make notes of pictures, poems, quotes, verses.  I soak up vocabulary and debates, and make lists and jot notes to use later. I remedy my blog hangovers with a folder of ideas for future use.  It helps to keep me interested and interesting.  It keeps me focused and it shows respect for those who are kind enough to read my posts.