You can’t just blog willy-nilly. I mean you can, but boy are you making life harder for yourself. I am currently committed to do at least 1 post a day for all of 2015. And to be honest, I really don’t have an end date. I needed a goal so unless I have grown to hate blogging, I don’t suspect my last post to be on the last day of 2015
Whenever you have a few minutes free, you should brainstorm your post ideas. It doesn’t have to be super organized. In fact, I like the freedom of a brainstorm session without any bounds to generate post ideas. Nothing has to be coherent at this point, and don’t try to think of themes or series at first. If you do get an idea for a theme or series don’t stress about adding too much detail right away.
The problem with having a brainstorm session any old-time is you are often found without a means to record these ideas right away. We have all had a great idea at some point that we couldn’t remember the details of later on. So one of the few rules of a brainstorming session is you must get it down on paper as soon as possible. Recording the idea at that very moment, when it is freshest, and maybe at its most insane, is best. Okay, I don’t put much down on paper because my handwriting is straight shite, but you get the point.
Don’t discount or cast off ANYTHING that even resembles an idea. Even if you have nothing more than a title, WRITE IT DOWN! Again, even with your first title ideas don’t worry about SEO or readability. Make your first title really long if you need to. You can always pare it down later. Working titles are a fantastic way to get over the nerves of writing the meat of a post. Sometimes I will think in terms of titles by coming up with 2 or 3 initially.
Start more than one post per writing session. Essentially you can take everything above and go in and create the beginnings of several posts. In fact I encourage you to fill out a post as quick as you can and then leave it. Don’t worry about punctuation, or complete sentences, or ANYTHING. Dump whatever is in your brain on to a page, digital or physical, and then don’t do anything to it. Leave it and move on to the next post.
Will you end up with a bunch of empty and incomplete posts? Yes. Will you guard against losing or forgetting something that could be an amazing post later? Again, yes. Now, once you have your brain dump session complete, then, and only then can you go back and flesh out these incomplete posts.
Of course this may not be your workflow at all. This workflow may be too chaotic and disorganized, but for many of you who find it hard to get past that blank page, or even a basic title, this can help. Forget all rules except to record everything, and I mean everything so you can wade through it later. In fact, this post has been sitting in my computer for probably over two weeks waiting to be finished using this very same method.