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“So, what do I blog about each time?” is a question I often get from clients. To keep your blog active and healthy, I recommend blogging at least 3 times per week. However, that notion is overwhelming for many. Even though you may be an expert in a topic, your mind may go completely blank when it comes time to blog, and then at other times when you’re not blogging, your idea cup runneth over.

The primary thing to remember is that blog posts don’t have to be long and complicated. You’re not writing an article, a report or a thesis. Many times a blog post is only a paragraph consisting of a few sentences that contain your thoughts about something. Now, doesn’t that sound easier than composing a 600-word post each time you sit down to blog?

Here are 20 ideas you can use to help you create a blog post when you’re stuck for an idea:

1. Current events. Can you link what you do in your business to a current event? Open up your daily newspaper or your RSS news reader and see what’s happening in the world, your country, your state, or your city. Give your opinion about the event and a solution, if you have it, and relate that to your business if you can.

2. Trends in your industry. I read constantly and subscribe to more industry publications than I have time to review. However, there are a handful that I do regularly read, and it’s to those that I look to for what the trends seem to be. When you blog about the trend, put your unique perspective on it, or write a rebuttal post, disagreeing with the relevance of the trend.

3. Get personal. Tell a story about what’s happening in your life or in your business that would be useful or instructive for your readers. Chronicle both your highs and lows, your wins and your struggles. One key to successful blogging is getting personal with your readers. The more “real” you are with your readers, the better your reader gets to know you and begins to like and trust you. You become a “real, live” human being to them who faces similar issues that they face.

4. Top 10. Most of my writing is in the form of a Top 10 list because it’s an easy way for me to outline the points I want to make and then go back and fill in the details for each point. In this case, each of your points for a topic can become an individual blog post, and when all the points are complete, you can compile the full list for an article for your ezine or website.

5. Frequently asked questions. If you’ve been in business for awhile, you know the questions that clients and prospective clients ask you to answer over and over again. Instead of repeatedly responding to the same questions, write a series of blog posts that answer your target market’s most frequently asked questions.

6. How you helped a client solve a problem. Clients hire you to solve a specific problem they’re having, whether they do that when they buy your service or your product. List 3-5 most recent problems that you have helped your clients solve. Create a post that talks about the problem and the solution you provided (either with your client’s permission, or by making it generic enough to hide the client’s identity) that becomes a learning experience for your readers.

7. Interview an expert. What people do your know and admire in your industry? If you admire them, chances are that members of your target market do, as well. Contact them for a short email or recorded interview and ask them 3-5 questions that you’d like to hear them answer about their lives, their businesses, industry trends, or how to solve a particular problem. Publish the interviews as blog posts, adding audio and graphics if you have them.

8. Solicit and answer questions. Ask your ezine subscribers or blog readers to ask you their most pressing question related to what you do. I do this and get questions for 1-2 blog posts per week, and it helps me stay in touch with the needs of my readers, as well.

9. Review something. Read a good book lately related to your industry? Just purchased a product to help you solve a problem? Reviews aren’t limited to the critics at the New York Times. Blog about your experience with a product, book, or service, highlighting both the high points and low points, and whether you would recommend that others use or purchase it.

10. Read other blogs. Go to Google’s Blog Search or Technorati and find other blogs related to your industry or your target market. Add those to your blog reader and take an hour or two each week to read the posts on those blogs. Do you agree or disagree with the post? Have another point of view? Think the blogger was on target but you want to expand on her point of view? Reading other blogs is a great way to generate ideas for your own blog.

11. Keep an idea file. Sometimes a blogging idea or concept will strike you when you don’t need (or want) to blog. Begin a blog idea file by creating a document or spreadsheet to track your ideas and thoughts. If you’re in the zone, go ahead and write the post, and then you can post it to your blog on a day when the idea well is dry.

12. Create a tutorial. There’s always something you can tell your target market how to do. Create a written, audio, or video tutorial of the process as your blog post. Depending on the complexity of the tasks, the tutorial may need to created in multiple parts, like Part 1, Part 2, etc., which would make for multiple posts to your blog.

13. Share a positive/negative email. I often share exceptionally positive or negative emails I receive from people (without names to protect their identity as appropriate) either to celebrate kudos I’ve received or to demonstrate how I responded to a particularly nasty or upsetting comment. I get the most mileage out of the negative emails, and I often ask for feedback about how my readers might respond to the situation.

14. Take a tour. Take a self-made in-person or virtual tour of something useful to your readers. For example, if you’re a dating coach, tour the top 5 online dating sites and report your experiences as a client in each. If you’re a restaurant consultant, visit 3 local restaurants and evaluate what’s often overlooked in staff training based on your experience as a customer.

15. Write about a Twitter or Facebook update. You only get 140 characters in Twitter to write about something. If you need more space, or want to respond in greater length to someone’s Tweet or Facebook status update, do so in your blog. Thought-provoking questions are often asked on Twitter, and the answers may inspire you to blog.

16. Create a “Best of” list. What are the top 7 blogs to read in your industry? How about the top 5 people to watch? What about the 10 most useful online tools you use? Nothing attracts attention on a blog quicker than a list, so create one yourself or ask your readers to help you in the process.

17. Report from an event. Attending a professional trade show, conference, or networking event? You can report live about your experiences at the event on your blog. Talk about the workshops your attended, the vendors you met, the speaker you heard — the sky’s the limit!

18. Debunk a myth. Each industry is plagued with myths and fallacies about success/failure or what does/doesn’t work that the industry professionals would like to see vanquished once and for all. Use your blog to debunk some of the most common myths/preconceptions/notions in your industry and set the record straight.

19. Talk to newbies. Picture yourself as a newbie in your industry once again. What do you know now that you didn’t know then? What questions did you ask? What knowledge do you have that you think everyone knows? Getting back to the basics can help bring all of your blog readers up to speed.

20. Write about a client conversation. Many times I’m inspired to blog as an expansion or continuation of a conversation I had with a client. The blog post focuses on a topic of the conversation, not the conversation itself. Typically the strategy/idea/technique you’ve discussed with one client will benefit your blog readers as well.

This is just the tip of a very large ice burg of ideas for posts to your blog. Take a look around your life, your business, conversations with clients and colleagues, and what’s happening in the world around you. You’ll soon begin to see more potentials for blog posts that you ever thought possible!

Blogging is one of the most popular activities people do on the Internet today. According to Technorati, there currently are seventy-five thousand (75,000) new blogs everyday and about 1.2 million new blog updates everyday. As the activity of blogging gets more popular, there will be more and more tools that will be created to specifically address the needs of the blogging population of the Internet users. This article will attempt to catalog some of the best ever blogging tools created for users. To help users find the tools that they need, these blog tools are classified here into four main categories – blog publishing, blog reading, blog searching and the blog toolbox – a collection of tools important to the serious blogger.

Blog publishing

Blog publishing tools can be further categorized into three sub-categories: Online blogging services, do-it-yourself blog publishing platforms, and accessory blog-publishing tools. Blogging services provide the blog engine that you need to get yourself started in blogging as well as the hosting. Though most of the services offer this for free, some of them require that you become paying members in order to fully enjoy all the benefits.

Blogger – Google’s Blogger is one of the earliest blogging services and it helped popularize blogging. It is one of the easiest ways to get started blogging because of the focus on usability and easy blog creation. The Blog this feature, which is integrated in many Google tools, makes posting to Blogger possible in many different situations. It is also integrated with Google’s Adsense advertising program that makes monetization of your blog quick and easy.

TypePad – Typepad is the largest paid-blogging service around. As mentioned, a paid subscription is required to create a blog using the service. It uses the Movable Type blogging technology but it caters more to the non-technical users.

Wordpress.com – one of the newcomers in the online blogging services, Wordpress gets its credibility from the success and popularity of the blogging engine that it uses -Wordpress.

Xanga – Xanga is one of the largest blog-networks, boasting a user base of 27 million users worldwide. It edges over its competitors by offering excellent community features such as blog rings, metros, and a social networking profile system.

MSN Spaces – Although it is relatively a newcomer in the blogging services space, MSN Spaces boasts of a huge user base, because of the ease at which existing MSN services users were able to start blogging. The integration with the rest of MSN’s services (hotmail, messenger) makes Spaces a very good blogging option for the existing users.

Do-it-yourself blogging platforms on the other hand, only provide the blogging engine. Although you have to find your own hosting service, DIY blogging platforms give you more control in configuring your blog. Below are some of the best DIY Blogging platforms.

Movable Type – Movable Type powers TypePad and it adds the usual advantages of a server-side blogging platform: flexibility, more advanced configuration, and total control over your blog.

Wordpress – Wordpress is an increasingly popular open-source blogging platform that is written in PHP and backed by a MySQL database.

Radio Userland – Radio Userland, one of the earliest content management systems used by the pioneering bloggers, is still a good blogging platform choice. It has solid RSS features that include a built-in aggregator. Configuration is done in a desktop web server then it is upstreamed or sync to the web server. This gives the blogger a cached copy of the whole blog.

Blog posting tools are third-party applications that are used to compose and publish blog posts. These tools usually support multiple blogging services and are ideal for those without a persistent Internet connection.

W. Bloggar and BlogJet – these are two of the best blog-posting tools in the market, and both are available for free. They support almost all of the blogging platforms. They do what most web-based posting apps does, including rich text editing, with the added feature of being able to save your drafts offline.

Performancing for Firefox – a Mozilla Firefox extension that allows you to immediately compose a blog post while using the Firefox browser. It is Ideal for active bloggers who use Firefox as their web browser. It automatically saves your unpublished posts.

Blog Reading

RSS/Atom aggregators and other RSS tools belong to this category.

My Yahoo – My Yahoo tried to bring the concept of RSS subscription to the Internet masses. Though it lacks the more advanced features, it serves well as a good aggregator.

Google Reader – Google’s web-based RSS aggregator that features an AJAX-driven user interface. It has a good support for tags or labels, and features a very nice reading interface. One of its best features is its labels-sharing feature that allows you to put aggregated content to your blog.

Bloglines – Bloglines is one of the most widely-used web-based RSS Reader. It uses the traditional two-frame reading interface, and subscriptions are grouped into folders. It has a good blog-suggest feature, that uses linking analysis to suggest which blogs might be of interest to you based on your existing subscription set. You can also share your subscriptions using Bloglines.

Blog Search

Tools used to search information and blogs, and to watch the blogosphere for topics or issues being actively discussed.

Technorati – Technorati is one of the best blog search engine, feature wise, and is indexing over 49.4 million web blogs. It serves as a one-stop shop for those who want to know the current happenings in the blogosphere, including features such as blog ranking based on linking, personal aggregator (for those who login) and many other nifty tools.

Sphere – one of the newcomers in blog search that came even after many other engines have folded down already. It promised to deliver more relevant blog search results, and it rightfully did so, as attested by its early beta testers. It features a “sphere it” feature that allows you automatically query http://sphere.com to see topics that might be related to what you’re currently reading.

Blogger’s Toolbox

A collection of other tools essential to the serious blogger

Mint / Measure Map /Google Analytics – these are three different tools used to analyze your blog statistics. Mint specializes in giving you a big-picture snapshot of your traffic, somewhat lacking in the providing specific details, something that Google Analytics is good at. Analytics can provide detailed information on what’s happening on your blog, which contents are popular, what keywords used in searches that bring you readers, and many others. It features a calendar to specify the time range of the analysis that you want to see. Measure Map, like Analytics is a fresh acquisition of Google, but still in early stages. It somewhat sits in the middle of Mint and Google Map in terms of what information is provided.

Akismet – Akismet is a highly-acclaimed anti-comment spam plugin for Wordpress blogs. It is free for personal use.

Feedburner – Feedburner is a tool that “burns” your RSS feeds in order to add tracking and analysis features. This way you can see statistics regarding your RSS subscribers.

The tools listed above are just a few of the many others that can help users; from those who are just starting to blog to those who want to become even better bloggers. It also includes some tools for searching and aggregating blogs, because a good blogger must learn to watch the blogosphere closely if it wants to be able to make more effective blog contents.