You need a thousand ideas.
Good. Great. Bad. Terrible. Don’t thinking about blogging in those terms.
Blogging, like many other forms of content creation, is partially a quantity game and partially a quality game. But I really believe that you can’t become a quality blogger without putting in some big effort in the quality area. That’s not to say that you don’t want every one of your posts to be amazing. You do. But the reality is that it likely won’t happen.
Not all of Hemingway’s books were winners. Not all of Spielberg’s movies were hits. Not all of David Foster’s songs were hits. Although these folks probably have the best winning percentage in their fields, the fact is that you really can’t start with a good idea and create something great.
That will happen sometimes. And once you get on a roll it will probably happen a few times in a row and it will feel like you can only write quality things. But the reality is that it’s the schedule and the routine that leads to quality.
Songwriters are a great example of this. Especially those that I’ve read about in the Nashville songwriting community. They almost all keep journals or notes on their phones with hundreds or even thousands of ideas for songs.
Are all of them good ideas?
Who knows?
Nobody knows.
A seemingly subpar title could turn into a hit song. Willie Nelson had a title for a song. Crazy. That’s just one word. It’s nothing amazing or even good. But the song is probably one of the most well known in history.
He Stopped Loving Her Today is a pretty good idea for a song. But it wasn’t a guarantee that it would be a hit. But that became one of the most well known songs in history.
However you go about coming up with ideas for blog posts – keywords, questions, etc. – at least think partially about quantity. Think about coming up with 10 at a time instead of trying to find the perfect idea. Think about doing this over and over again so that over time you have thousands of ideas just ready for you to tackle when the time comes.
That’s a big secret to the world of blogging. One blog post can become a huge hit. But in order to get that idea you likely need to come up with 1,000+ ideas.