I was complaining to my bestie Tracy that I had no idea what I should write about tonight. I’m writing this early because I have a D&D game later, in about an hour and a half. So to make sure I post something, I opened up my text editor and stared at the screen and realized that a) my mind was blank, and b) if I want to write topical posts for a wide variety of audiences, I need to be able to come up with good post ideas, lots of them, quickly.
The downside to having a blog that is just “whatever in the Hell I want to post about” is that I have so many options that it’s like having no options at all. If this were a sports blog, I could just write something about any of the many many many sports games that happened today, or the general news, or follow-up on previous topics. If this was a gaming blog, I could piggy-back off the narrow focus to come up with something to write about. While I am working on a more specific blog (coming soon) this place does not have that restriction. So, sometimes, I sit down and flounder.
Which led me to the idea: write about how to come up with blog post ideas. Easy-peasy! If nothing else I can rant about not feeling creative lately, but if I do a little research, I might come up with a strategy, a process, one that works for me.
Because I’ve been on this new blogging kick, the Algorithm has taken notice and has started to feed me Content about blogging, writing, and freelancing. Earlier today it surfaced a video from a creator about making money using Google News, which got me to click and watch. Turns out, the idea was “find today’s top story on a topic you know about, paste the contents into a Large Language Model (LLM) “paraphraser” (and those should be double-heavy-extra scare quotes, because, really) and then sell that paraphrased article to some other content mill. That’s not something I would do.
I mean, maybe, if my blog were about summarizing news for people, I might take a look at the top headlines and rewrite it myself, but I would absolutely not use an LLM for that. The video creator (whom I will not link because don’t want to encourage that behavior) did say to re-read what you get back from the summarizer, because that’s why they advised finding a topic you know about… still.
But the basic idea of scanning today’s headlines is a good one for finding out what everyone is talking about, I suppose. That would be great if this were a “recent news” kind of blog, instead of a “spontaneous unedited opinions of Some Random Guy on the Internet” kind of blog.
I have been using Google Analytics and Google Search Console on my recent blog-push, and it’s hilarious to me what kinds of search terms lead people here. A big one is “chicken butt shirt” for example, because way way way back in the day I posted about a cool and funny button I bought off the internet. “Guess what?” “Chicken butt” is a phrase I and my bestie use frequently. But, like, can I turn that in to a blog post? Could I get 1000-1500 words out of that? No, I don’t think I could.
What else does Google say people like about the blog? Well, another top search term is “Bettie Bondage” which, in this site’s case, leads to a movie review I posted a long time about about a biopic of Bettie Page. Again, I’m grateful for the traffic but if I used that as a basis for future content this might become an NSFW blog.
Not that there’s anything wrong with those. Just not really what I’m aiming for here. I’d start a new blog for that kind of content (note to self: look into starting a new blog for that kind of content. I hear it’s a sure money-maker.)
Not sure where that leaves me. Let’s stick a pin in this. Maybe I’ll do some actual research and write up a “how to keep your blog swimming in content” article.
I’ll add that to the Ideas File.