The word “inspiration” is such a buzzword these days and I can’t help but feel inundated with the idea and feeling rather uninspired. I’ve always admired people who post a lot more than I do and bloggers who just churn out really original content. (Hello, Jaime! I’m looking at you.)
I’ve compiled some tips that I’ve found helpful (most of the time) to find inspiration for blog posts.
Experimenting with new formats and structures
We have a pretty good idea of what works best for us on the Buffer blog, but it’s always interesting to experiment with new content types as well.
Here’s a list of the different types of formats I’ve experimented with over the past few months:
listicles,
personal stories,
opinion pieces,
how-to guides,
feature announcements,
link roundups,
posts about products and apps I like,
posts about books I’ve read
interview-based posts.
I think these are all great ideas but I find that it’s hard to come up with different, new, fresh content. Branching out is nice for me but after a while, I feel like I’m swimming around in the same humdrum again. Someone please help me.
Branching out my reading tastes
Growing up, my mom always told me to read different genres. While she still thinks I read the same stuff, I know that I read different types of blogs, as well as books, to get a feel for what’s out there.
Feedly, which is my Google Reader replacement, is organized into several categories– design, DIY, book blogs, fashion blogs and uncategorized (aka all of my old Google Reader imported stuff). I’m not quite sure how many subscriptions to blogs I have but I’ve found that scrolling through the blog posts and even just looking at the images can inspire me. I once got a blog post idea from seeing a photo of coffee (no joke) and I think aesthetically-pleasing things or just interesting things that prod your mind can trigger thoughts and emotions that can become a diving board for a blog post.
I think it doesn’t have to apply to blog reading either. It can apply to magazines and it just turns out that I have a wide interest so I read Time, NYTimes, New Yorker (on occasion), Teen Vogue, Vogue, and Nylon. My blog post about the growing obsession with statistics was inspired by an article in Teen Vogue that was about how a lot of teenagers measure their own success on the number of Twitter follows and Instagram likes they get. However, I definitely don’t think that you need to subject yourself to reading something that you don’t like, though.
I’m curious to see where you find inspiration from. Is there a site (or sites) that you find that keeps inspiring you? A blog?
