Career Blogging 101: What Should I Blog About?

Image via CrunchBase

Have you started your career blog yet?  I'm going to assume you have.  If you haven't yet but you want to go and read these posts:

• Is Blogging a Good Idea?
• Career Blogging 101: Getting Started

One of the most difficult things that new bloggers have a hard time with is figuring out what to blog about.  Before you can figure out what you are going to blog about, you need to have a good understanding of your blog and what you want it to focus on.  Assuming that you have already figured that out, let's talk about some ways to generate ideas.

One of the best ways to generate ideas for blog posts is to read.  Read articles, news, and other blog posts about your field of work.  Let's say you are an administrative assistant (or you want to be).  Start by going to Google and searching for "administrative assistant."  You are likely going to find a lot of job posting sites at first so you'll have to narrow it down.  

When you do a search in Google you are searching for everything by default, but you can narrow it down a lot by searching for specific kinds of sites.  On the left of the Google page there is a list of types of sites you can search like Images or Videos.  If you select the "more" option it will open up and look like the picture to the right.  Try clicking on Blogs or News or Videos and see what kind of results you get.

Now, as you are looking through these search results, don't actually click on anything.  Just look at the titles and descriptions.  As you do, you will find topics that you can write about.  Jot down your ideas in point form.

Once you have a nice list of ideas (15-30) is a good start, look through your list and see what clicks with you.  What do you feel that you have something to say about?  Pick one of the ideas you have written down and expand on it.  Write down some points that you would like to include when you write about it.  Before you know it you will have the outline of a blog post!

There are other ways you can come up with ideas for blogs posts that I will talk about in the future.  One of my favorites is the Swipe File!  Intrigued?  Then you should subscribe to the feeds of Robertson Reader - there's a box near the top of the page where you can enter your email so you'll be notified when there is a new post up!