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How do you find topics to blog about?

Tim Smith on July 01, 2019

Writing blog posts isn't super hard for me, possibly because I've always enjoyed writing and I come from a family of teachers. I find myself spendi...
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Tyler V. (he/him)

Whenever I offer to help someone with a problem their having and they say "Thanks so much! That really cleared it up for me" I know that means I should put it in a blog post (doesn't mean I always do it - but does mean I should).

I'm working on noticing when I have those moments so that I can start writing toward myself as well.

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Tim Smith

I suppose for me that happens backwards. I write the post and then get told it was helpful.

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Isabel Costa

These past weeks I've been thinking of putting into blog posts what I speak about in my public talks. For example, I tend to do talks about Open Source (20-40 min), I think that I can easily write blog posts talking about different sections/sub-topics of Open Source, from the talks I prepare.

Whenever I finally write the posts, it ends up being useful to at least one person ๐Ÿค— So even the smallest or simplest topic (from your perspective), can serve a great purpose.

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Tim Smith

Iโ€™d like to start doing talks to further elaborate on some of the posts Iโ€™ve written. Ive never thought about going the opposite direction with it!

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Isabel Costa

It is interesting how people can end up doing the same things in opposite directions :P I started taking on opportunities to do talks because I wanted to spread the word on what I learned about Open Source and then I realized that talks are seen by a specific audience that can physically or virtually attend your talk... You have a much wider audience out there that can find your blog posts. So it seems a great and practical thing to do, to turn talks into blog posts :)

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Tim Smith

Itโ€™s definitely something I want to get into. I just donโ€™t know how and there arenโ€™t really meetups in my area.

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Max Ong Zong Bao

I set aside 30 mins to brain storm 50 topics that I want to write about.

Then pick 3 best topics and further filter it down to 1 that I like the most to write about.

It saves me time to worry about what to write about

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Tim Smith

Never thought about doing it this way. Do you ever recycle topics that werenโ€™t chosen?

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Max Ong Zong Bao

Yes I do that as well

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Tim Smith

Thanks for the advice. Iโ€™ll give this a shot.

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Stella Mwanahamuntu

I am quite a quirky person. I am also an African woman in tech. There are so many barriers to overcome before we can talk and in some cases write code. I write about that journey.

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Florin Pop

I have a daily task to write down 2 blog post ideas. Iโ€™ve done it for a month now and I have over 60 ideas written. โ˜บ๏ธ

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Tim Smith

This is also a really good idea. Do you concern yourself with SEO and keyword research?

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Florin Pop

Meh, not really... I just write the ideas down and then when I'm going to write the article I'll think about those (more or less ๐Ÿ˜„ )

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Tim Smith

Iโ€™ll give this a try too. Thanks!

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Simon Vrachliotis ๐Ÿ„๐Ÿ€๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ˜

As garyvee says: document, don't create.

Blog about what you just are learning now, what you are building. Share your journey! ๐Ÿ˜Ž

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Shreyash

Checking top queries from stackoverflow is one way to go.

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Tim Smith

Iโ€™ve tried this but never gotten much in the way of ideas. Is there something specific you do to find good topics this way?