I bet if you do any writing whatsoever, at some point you felt you had writers block.
Even just a blog. I’ve got a blog or two about women’s flip flops and fashion, and it can be tough to keep it up to date. We all know Google and our fans and readers love to get new content. But for a lot of us, new content is hard to come by.
But is it really?
Here are is one huge techniques I’ve started using that really kicks writer’s block in the butt.
Autoblogging.
What’s autoblogging you ask? You might even be asking “Oh no, isn’t that the thing all these spam blogs are made from”?
Well, yes, autoblogging seems to have it’s start from the land of black hat search engine optimization.
It’s a tool folks use to basically setup a robot and have it blog constantly. It’ll go out to places like Yahoo News, Yahoo Answers, Amazon, YouTube, wherever, and scrape together content from those places to create a keyword rich blog post.
You can see how someone might use that for “evil” by creating a blog on auto pilot.
But just like how so much great technology starts in “bad” places (look at the porn industry and the innovations they’ve made to video, DVD’s, marketing, etc), autoblogging has the potential for being used for so much good.
Here’s how I use it for my own purpose.
I’ve gone ahead and setup an autoblog watching all sorts of keywords I’m interested in. Flip flops, sandals, beach, summertime, etc.
But I also leave the robot in Draft mode. I don’t let the guy just create posts for me and publish them. What I do is I go in and look at the drafts he’s made and see if anything is actually interesting.
More often than not something is.
I’ve found out about all sorts of crazy things related to flip flops. Some hilarious video of a drunk guy trying to get into his sandals, some protest in Israel where people are wearing flip flops and jeans to work, the arsenic poisoning going on in Bangladesh.
And I don’t just publish the post that the robot makes. I use a snippet of the post as a seed for my own post.
So I basically say “Oh that news about Bangladesh is very interesting. Here, let me write my own post on it, and cite a couple sentences from the original article so the reader has context”.
And whallah, an idea for post given to me from a robot.
Some autoblogging software costs money, so for a poor mans version of this, I suggest you setup a bunch of Google/Yahoo News alerts, or learn to use RSS feeds very well. So you have a constant barrage of ideas to your RSS reader or inbox for blog posts.
The advantage of the autoblogger though is that it it seems any little bit of help, well, helps get us over the hill of creating something. So just that two sentences in cites in a post, can make a big difference to me getting off my butt and getting some thoughts and words on paper. It’s better than staring at a blank screen, starting from scratch.
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