Are you running short of ideas for your articles? Is generating fresh
ideas for writing becoming difficult? By following the techniques
discussed in this article, you will be an article generating power
house.
1. Subscribe to a dozen RSS feeds on various subjects you are most
interested in. Scan through the feeds every morning or at night and
select a few articles for thorough reading. After reading the articles,
tag them using your own classification system.
Classifying articles in different categories helps locate them
quickly. Use Google's RSS reader for reading and tagging the RSS feeds.
You will have access to your categorized articles from any computers
connected to the Internet.
2. Subscribe to a few print magazines and read them regularly.
After you finish reading an article, record the main points of the
article in a Google note. You will have access to these notes anywhere
in the World.
3. Use a PDA and carry it with you wherever you go. Better yet, get
a PDA with a camera and cell phone. You will only carry one gadget for
all your communication, organization, and content generation needs.
Take pictures of interesting places, events, and moments you come
across in your daily life. Use the voice recorder of the PDA to record
whenever an idea hits you. Every night, transfer the ideas from your
PDA to Google notes and upload your pictures to flickr.
4. Scan through the comments posted by others on the online
articles you read regularly. Record interesting ideas, pros and cons of
an issue, and strong opinions posted by others in your Google notes.
Leverage the wisdom of the crowd.
5. Have lunch with friends at least once a week. Bounce ideas off
them on any topic. Mix ideas from divergent topics to create new ideas
in you own subjects.
6. Use the time like driving, watching TV while exercising in a
treadmill, etc. to think about your favorite topics and try to relate
to things you observe on the road and on the TV. When you get an idea,
record it in your PDA.
7. Go through all the ideas and articles you have recorded in
Google notes and your RSS reader to create new ideas by giving new
twists to the old ideas. Combine two or more ideas and change or
improve an existing idea to come up with your own idea.
8. Use a variety of online tools like Technorati, Digg, Delicious,
etc. for writing inspiration. Every hour, hundreds of new articles and
news stories are posted in these sites. Quickly scan them to hit a few
gold nuggets that can serve as springboards for new ideas.
9. Using on-line tools discussed earlier, select an issue and jot
down all the pros and cons. Search Google to enhance the idea by adding
more pros and cons. Once you have collected a dozen diverse opinions,
you will be able to write an article based on those facts in a pro-con
format.
10. If you are good at using data for analysis and comfortable in
the use of a spreadsheet, draw charts in the spreadsheet and look for
patterns in the data. Provide you own interpretation to the data.
Illustrate your articles with charts and graphs.
11. To generate topics for your article, use overture keyword
selector. Select a single keyword and run it through the overture. You
will see a dozen or more keywords based on the search popularity. Copy
a few selected keywords to a notepad. Now, take each keyword and do a
search in online sites like Digg, Technorati, etc. You will see a
number of articles. Read them to generate ideas.
12. Ask yourself what if, what else, and why not questions on an
issue and search the Internet to find answers from different sources.
Create new ideas generated from existing materials, provide
step-by-step guide for somebody to practice an obvious idea, or offer
benefits of practicing an old idea.