Maintaining a blog is not easy. Growing “hits” and readership is doubly so.

In order to get repeat visits, it’s important to have fresh content everyday. It happens to the best of us, including professional bloggers or even writers – the dreaded “writer’s block”. It happens to me often. Now, I’m going to share with you some tips on how to find fresh (and cool) content for your blog…

Finding Content for your Blog

1. Know Your Niche or your Target Market – If you’re blogging about something, whether it be your favorite hobby or a topic, you should know your niche. This means that you have to monitor well-known sites or even similar blogs that cater to your topic. If the have RSS feeds, subscribe to them and read them daily. I use Google Reader for this. It’s a great tool and aggregates all my favorite blogs under one screen. Anyways, you have to keep track of hot trends or topics in your chosen field.
2. Find News and Press Releases – Going to official sites can land you fresh news items or announcements about the latest products or services that big companies (related to your chosen blog topic) are dying to have replicated and spread. Find a new angle and use the PR to convert the news into something that your readers will appreciate.
3. Use Search Engines – Google is always my best friend. Enter your blog’s key words and you’ll find thousands of leads and detailed links. Surf through it and you’ll come up with fresh ideas for posts or articles guaranteed.
4. Multimedia – Youtube and Flickr are also great choices to find new photos or videos relating to your blog’s topic. Do a little bit of searching through these sites and you’re bound to see a cool topic or two.
5. Social Media – Your friends always have tons to share. Sometimes, I use this (with their permission) to fashion a fresh perspective on a new post.
6. Expound on an Idea – Have a hot topic trending online? Expound on it with a bit of research. For example, when the Jejemon craze was hot in the social networks, I called upon my buddy Google and did a bit of research. I compiled the facts and made them into a fresh post here. Doing research is always fun. Not only do you learn new things, you get to figure out your strategy on how to write the story that will cater to your readers.

Remember to write for your readers. You’re not trying to satisfy yourself here (although a lot of bloggers get satisfaction for finishing a well-written article), the key here is that your readers should be first and foremost in your mind. After all, you wouldn’t want to readers to stop visiting your blog if they don’t find value in your content, yes?

Finally, make sure to give credit where credit it due. Leave a little link love and ask permission if you are using someone else’s Intellectual Property (IP).

And don’t forget to have fun! Blogging is a way to expand your knowledge, give value to your readers and to yourself. The word-of-mouth will come naturally. Soon, you’ll have thousands of readers a day and reap the rewards of your work.

Good luck to all! I hope this simple post helps!

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• This post was brought to you by Geekzkrieg.com, the Philippines’ online magazine for geeks