What To Do When Blogging Gets Blah

TweetBlogging can be a cathartic experience — it provides an outlet to discuss the things that your spouse and friends are sick of hearing you talk about. 

But it can also be a nightmare — a time-consuming activity that you dread on a daily basis.  In an earlier post, I compared blogging with an exercise regiment.  And just like an exercise regiment, blogging can get boring — doing the same old thing with each post can be enough to put you to sleep at your laptop.

If you are getting bored with the same old format – switch it up a bit.

Try one of these blog post formats and see if you can wake up those creative juices:

Series Posts – A series post is released over a specified time period.  For example, once a day for a week you  release a portion of the post.  This is a good post to use when you are interested in going into more depth than a single blog post would allow.

Check out this blog post series on setting up a business blog on WordPress for an example.

Review Post -  A review post does just what it says – reviews something.  This could be an event, product, service, another website, etc.

Want to get the attention of someone that could benefit your business?  Review them.  Review their product or service or a presentation that they gave.

Have a look at this review post about a Pay Per Click Marketing firm in the Saint Louis area for an example.

Links Post -  A links post is the easiest type of post to write, especially if you spend a good deal of time researching on the Internet.  A links post is just a series of links that are pointing to other good resources on the Internet.  Again, this is a good way to get someone’s attention as most website owners pay attention to who is linking to them and will pay a visit to the sites that are linking to them.

Have a look at this links post that contains three online video resources for my readers.

How-To Post – How-To posts should be a major part of your blogging.  When people find useful blogs that show them how to do something valuable, they will tell others about it.  Find out what your target market needs and then spend time creating the resources that will help them with the problem.

Here is an example how-to post on setting up a twitter RSS feed.

Rant Post – This is getting to be an all-too familiar type of blog post.  I used to have a “rant” category on this blog, but I found that it wasn’t very popular.  Unless you have a particularly funny style to your writing, I would stay away.

Here is an example rant about how aggravated I got with Sports Illustrated.

Video Review Post – This is another easy post to do when you are in a pinch for time but still want to add some value to your readers.  You simply find a piece of online video, watch it and then comment on the video.  The video should be relevant to your target market, of course, but sometimes you just want to throw something random out there that you thought was interesting or funny.

Here is a post I did about United Airlines breaking a guys guitar and the repercussions that United faced when the guy went viral on YouTube.

Video Blog Post - Another form of video post is shooting a video of yourself with a web cam or other recording device.  Shooting video of yourself discussing a topic can be a great way to engage your readers and add some personalization to your blog.

Darren Rowse at ProBlogger has been doing a lot of video posts of late and posting them on YouTube, you can usually view his latest on his home page.