One great way to find new content for your blog is to capture things that you do in your daily routine that relate to your topic and then to present them as a blog post.
This won’t relate to every blog topic but many of us are living lives that are a gold mine of content – we just need to learn to capture and repurpose it.
Let me give you five examples of how to capture and repurpose daily activities for blog content:
1. Use your answer to a reader question as a post – one of the most obvious ways to capture content is to use the email (or even instant messaging) interactions that you have as the basis for posts.
Most bloggers get questions from readers at least on a semi regular basis (whether via email or in comments on their posts). Replying to these questions via email is a great thing to do as it gives a reader some personal attention – but it can sometimes feel like wasted time to write an email with advice that only one person will ever read. Why not ask the reader if they mind you answering their question publicly? If one reader has the question then others are sure to be thinking it so you’ll be helping others, plus you’ve just racked up another blog post. Here’s a recent example of this.
Alternatively simply take a question of a reader that they want you to answer and make it an open discussion post on your blog – with permission of course (see this recent example).
2. Use someone’s email answer to you as a post – how about flipping the last idea on it’s head and repurposing an email that someone else sent you as a guest post on your blog? I’m regularly asking others how they do things, picking their brains for advice on different topics etc – what if instead of getting an answer like this and then simply saying thanks you asked them if they’d mind you using it as the basis for a post? They might prefer you didn’t or it may be that you only use a short quote from their email as part of a larger post – but I’d bet that most of us have emails in our inboxes that would benefit our readers.
3. Document how you complete a task – if you write a blog with a ‘how to’ type component to it one of the simplest ways to create content is to simply keep a record of how you do something and then to write it up as a post. I did this recently in a post telling readers how I cleared my email inbox.
These types of posts tend to go down very well with readers because it takes your blog from being a theoretical blog and makes it much more bedded down in reality. It’s also much more personal and inspiring to not only read how to do something but to read how someone else did it.
4. Video yourself doing something – extending upon this idea, why not video (or even photograph) you doing something? Instead of just a textual report of how you do something to visually show it can be very powerful.
There are a number of approaches to take with this:
- Pure Video – just simply a video of you completing your task
- Video/Stills – using a combination of video and still iamges – as I did in my post yesterday on talking readers through how I take an idea for a post through to hitting publish on it in terms of workflow.
- Screen Casting – if your task is computer related actually capture that as a video and talk your readers through the process.
5. Record a conversation as a podcast or videocast – we all have conversations all day and every day and some of these conversations are relevant to the topics that we blog about. So why not capture some of them? Buying a recording device isn’t that expensive these days and editing a conversation down into a few bite sized but helpful snippets isn’t that difficult. Of course you’ll want to get permission from the people you talk to!
Again this approach not only captures something that can be repurposed into content but adds variety and personality to your blog.
The Key to Capturing Daily Life and Repurposing for Content
The main advice I’d give with each of these strategies is to keep it relevant to your blog. While the occasional blogger seems to get away with posting pictures of their latest meal, video of what their cat did to their new couch etc – this is probably not going to go down too well on most of our niche focused blogs.
The key is to find daily activities that you can draw on that also relate to what your blog is about and that will be useful to your readers.
What examples can you give of when you’ve captured things from your daily life and repurposed them as blog content?
