Finding ideas for blog posts is an art, especially if you post at least once a day. Someone on my friends list indicated that they were trolling the internet looking for information on how to come up with ideas. It got me thinking about how I come up with my own ideas, and I thought I’d share my tactics with you today.

Be Aware of Your Social Networks

Today, my blog post was inspired by a conversation on plurk. I’ve gotten inspiration from conversations I’ve followed on the microblogging sites like plurk and twitter, from people’s myspace and facebook pages, etc. I look for a need or a gap in information and answer that need with my blog post. Then, I return to the social network and make an announcement that the post is up and that they may find it helpful and give the link.

Get Inspired from Forums

I’ve also created blog posts centered around forum conversations. Sometimes I’ll take a forum post I’ve made and turn it into a blog post. I’ll edit the content slightly and add headings to make it more readable, but the content is usually the same. Or, I’ll write a post as a response to a conversation without actually posting in the forum itself.

Google Trends

I love to see what’s popular on google for the day. I do that by visiting Google Trends. This is an easy way to get some immediate search engine traffic if you write the post and optimize the keywords correctly. Today, one of the popular keywords is “new search engine”. If I had a technology related blog, I would surely write about Cuil, a new search engine that is positioning itself as indexing more sites than google.

What’s Going on in My Life?

The other day, I spent several hours researching how to increase my blog’s page rank. I turned all of that research into my blog post for the day. I did it for two reasons - so I could help my readers, and so I could find the information I gathered rather quickly. It helps to be aware of my own life and extracting information and anecdotes from that and turning them into blog posts. This will also serve to infuse some personality and life into your blog.

I Love DMOZ

On the surface, DMOZ may not look like much. It’s called the “Open Directory Project” and is a listing of websites and blogs. I like to browse through the different categories and visit some of the sites until I start to see some category trends. I turn these trends into blog posts.

RSS Feeds Are Your Friends…

I don’t use this technique nearly enough but when I do, I get tons of ideas. What I’ll do is subscribe to various blogs that are in my niche and check in with them almost daily. One of my greatest pieces of inspiration is reading what other people are writing about and reacting to that.

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At first, it was hard to articulate exactly how I come up with my blog posts. This process has become somewhat automatic. But I took some time to reflect and realized that I use these standard tools in a daily basis.

If I can’t think of a blog post idea for the day even though I try all of those techniques, I usually just do something else, like clean my kitchen. That usually does the trick - I sit and reflect about my day’s research and something inevitably jumps out at me.