Sep 22

Written by: profitimo
Saturday, September 22, 2007

Are you running short of ideas for your articles? Is generating fresh ideas for writing becoming difficult? By following the techniques discussed in this article, you will be an article generating power house. 

1. Subscribing to a dozen RSS: Subscribe to a dozen RSS feeds on various subjects you are most interested in. Scan through the feeds every morning or at night and select a few articles for thorough reading. After reading the articles, tag them using your own classification system. Classifying articles in different categories helps locate them quickly. Use Google's RSS reader for reading and tagging the RSS feeds. You will have access to your categorized articles from any computers connected to the Internet.

2. Subscribing to Magazines: Subscribe to a few print magazines and read them regularly. After you finish reading an article, record the main points of the article in a Google note. You will have access to these notes anywhere in the World.

3. Using a PDA: Use a PDA and carry it with you wherever you go. Better yet, get a PDA with a camera and cell phone. You will only carry one gadget for all your communication, organization, and content generation needs. Take pictures of interesting places, events, and moments you come across in your daily life. Use the voice recorder of the PDA to record whenever an idea hits you. Every night, transfer the ideas from your PDA to Google notes and upload your pictures to flickr.

4. Scan: Scan through the comments posted by others on the online articles you read regularly. Record interesting ideas, pros and cons of an issue, and strong opinions posted by others in your Google notes. Leverage the wisdom of the crowd.

5. Go and create Ideas: Have lunch with friends at least once a week. Bounce ideas off them on any topic. Mix ideas from divergent topics to create new ideas in you own subjects.

6. Use you Ideas: Use the time like driving, watching TV while exercising in a treadmill, etc. to think about your favorite topics and try to relate to things you observe on the road and on the TV. When you get an idea, record it in your PDA.

7. Combine Ideas: Go through all the ideas and articles you have recorded in Google notes and your RSS reader to create new ideas by giving new twists to the old ideas. Combine two or more ideas and change or improve an existing idea to come up with your own idea.

8. Online Tools: Use a variety of online tools like Technorati, Digg, Delicious, etc. for writing inspiration. Every hour, hundreds of new articles and news stories are posted in these sites. Quickly scan them to hit a few gold nuggets that can serve as springboards for new ideas.

9. Evaluate using Online Tools: Using on-line tools discussed earlier, select an issue and jot down all the pros and cons. Search Google to enhance the idea by adding more pros and cons. Once you have collected a dozen diverse opinions, you will be able to write an article based on those facts in a pro-con format.

10. Analyse: If you are good at using data for analysis and comfortable in the use of a spreadsheet, draw charts in the spreadsheet and look for patterns in the data. Provide you own interpretation to the data. Illustrate your articles with charts and graphs.

11. Generate topics and ideas: To generate topics for your article, use overture keyword selector. Select a single keyword and run it through the overture. You will see a dozen or more keywords based on the search popularity. Copy a few selected keywords to a notepad. Now, take each keyword and do a search in online sites like Digg, Technorati, etc. You will see a number of articles. Read them to generate ideas.

12. Interact with your innerself: Ask yourself what if, what else, and why not questions on an issue and search the Internet to find answers from different sources. Create new ideas generated from existing materials, provide step-by-step guide for somebody to practice an obvious idea, or offer benefits of practicing an old idea.

Related Links: 

Four Types of Discursive Writing 

Article marketing tips 

Secrets of Article Marketing  

Wikipedia:Guide to writing better articles

Recommended Books: 

How to Write Articles for Newspapers & Magazines, 2/e (Step By Step) - by Sova 

Writer's Digest Handbook Of Magazine Article Writing - by Michelle Ruberg and Ben Yagoda 

The Craft of Writing Articles (Allison & Busby Writers' Guides) - by Gordon Wells  



Author: Steven E

Email: wake (dot) up (dot)up (at) gmail (dot) com 

Around the world, Steven E is known as a highly successful publisher, entrepreneur, speaker, coach, mentor, and best-selling author. The Team Publishers program, that he helped to develop, is the publisher of the Wake Up?Live the Life You Love best-selling book series with over 12 million stories in print.  To find out more go to either http://www.wakeuplive.com or http://www.stevene.com today! Steven E is also featured in the movie Pass it On!

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