Where to Find Kindling to Light Your Blog’s Fire
by Antone Roundy | 2 Comments | Blogging
Blogging is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. 10% of the time, you're inspired to write about something. The other 90% you're sweating over the fact that you haven't got a clue what to say. It's no wonder most blogs fizzle and die after the first few posts.
Finding sources of inspiration is one of the grand keys to maintaining an active blog. The other day, I discovered* a source I hadn't heard of before: Amazon's list of the most commonly highlighted passages in Kindle books. (* Andrew Hansen tweeted Ruud Hein's blog post about it -- thanks for the inspiration for this blog post, guys!)
What's so great about knowing what people are highlighting? It tells you what other people think is interesting. Blog about it, and you've increased your chances of talking about something people are searching for and want to read.
Now knowing what the most popular highlights are is all find and good. But what if you're in the fitness niche and the most popular highlights don't say anything about fitness? Sure, it's a popular topic, but it's not going to hit the top of the list often.
Your out of luck, right?
Nope. Amazon has made the data searchable, so you can find the most popular highlights for virtually any topic!
What would really make this resource great would be if Amazon offered RSS feeds to enable us track the latest search results. That way we could keep on top of the hottest highlights without having to visit the site and repeat our searches all the time.
(I was going to make a scraper plugin for Grouper to do that, but it would violate Amazon's terms of use for the site. Too bad!)
Imagine what you could do with that data as an Amazon affiliate -- subscribe to the hot highlights for your niche. Then when something new hits the list, not only would you know what book to blog about and promote, but you'd know which passages to quote to get people interested in buying!
Thanks for the comment and feedback, Jeremy. I definitely agree that doing work you enjoy is, if not essential to quality of life, at least a great privilege.
I'm grateful for the people who do the work that society needs, but that would be soul-s...Do you struggle to come up with things to blog about? Where do you find inspiration? Post a comment and share your insights on the subject.
September 22nd, 2010 at 3:47 pm
Hey Antone,
Shame about the Grouper plugin, that would have been very, very cool.
I have to admit finding a topic to set up a blog around has been a major stumbling block for me since day one.
I have found that unless blogging is easy, takes up a limited amount of time and is about something that I truly enjoy then my blogs tend to die a slow and laborious death.
Finding something that your prepared to dedicate the majority of your time to, and have the discipline to stick to it is something that has eluded me right up to this point.
I recently had a friend say to me that I just need to pick a topic that is fun and I truly get a lot of joy from, forget about making money that will come, just do something that you really enjoy.
I think that is good advice, seeing how up till now writing a blog because it can make me money hasn't worked for me. I just get so bored with writing about something I have no personal experience with.
Any ways, good post always enjoy em.
September 22nd, 2010 at 4:03 pm
Thanks for the comment and feedback, Jeremy. I definitely agree that doing work you enjoy is, if not essential to quality of life, at least a great privilege.
I'm grateful for the people who do the work that society needs, but that would be soul-shrinkingly boring to me. I've been there before, and it was like pulling teeth trying to keep myself motivated and giving my employer an honest days work.