Creating a Blog Concept for New Bloggers

 
This guest post is by Mariana Ashley
One of the most difficult aspects of starting up a blog is creating a concept. Especially when creating a blog intended to collect ad revenue or your first official "serious" blog (as in, you want this blog to have thousands of subscribers and launch you into a blogging career), devising a foundation that will unify all your potential posts and ideas can become terrifyingly daunting. Any experienced or successful blogging guru will tell you that planning is critical in this phase of blogging. Fortunately, the variety of methods for planning and creating a blog is currently approaching infinity.

Stop and Ask Why

This is a crucial step that not enough bloggers do. In order to have a successful blog, you have to define and redefine the purpose of your blog. This may include some personal goals like "keep my writing skills up" or "have an online presence for my work." Remember that you should also ask why your blog will be read by others. What purpose will it serve for them? Will it serve a valuable niche topic? Will it provide good information that is otherwise hard to find? There are never too many why questions to ask before starting a project. The more you define why you are creating the blog and why it will be important to others, the more valuable and focused your blog will become in the end result.

Research

First and foremost, research research research! You should be reading any and every blog related to any idea you might want to blog about. If you don't have a feed reader, get one now! Seriously, if you want to consider yourself a blogger and don't want your life to become a nightmare of bookmarking and internet history searching, you need a reader like any aspiring author needs a bookshelf (or milk crates if they're on a budget).

As a Google fan, I use Google Reader to aggregate my feeds, but I recently started using Feedly (which basically transforms Google Reader into a personalized magazine) to consume my feeds. Since many readers allow you to integrate, import, or export your feeds, you can easily experiment with various readers and see what works best for you. Remember to organize your feeds and create a folder for blogs that give you inspiration for your new concept.

Brainstorm

Believe it or not, brainstorming is an essential process of project planning that too few bloggers (and countless other professions for that matter) actually implement. With all the free (usually for at least some limited service) project planning software and web applications available, there's no excuse to forgo this planning step. Of course, Word or Notepad – or even a physical sheet of paper and a pen – are all you really need to brainstorm, but it can be fun to get fancy.

Of course, it's a good idea to define any purpose and principles of your blog before jumping into brainstorming, but it's by no means a necessity. Just blindly brainstorming blog topics can become a huge benefit and give you ideas for your blog that you would never have thought about during research.