About: I’m a full stack developer who has experience with several front-end tools like Reactjs, Vuejs, and jQuery as well as some back-end tools like PHP, Laravel, Node, and Express.
Writing blog posts isn't super hard for me, possibly because I've always enjoyed writing and I come from a family of teachers. I find myself spending a lot more time trying to find things to write about than actually composing an article. I'm looking for new ways to reduce the amount of time I spend looking for topics.
How do you decide on topics to write about?
Whenever I offer to help someone with a problem their having and they say "Thanks so much! That really cleared it up for me" I know that means I should put it in a blog post (doesn't mean I always do it - but does mean I should).
I'm working on noticing when I have those moments so that I can start writing toward myself as well.
I suppose for me that happens backwards. I write the post and then get told it was helpful.
I set aside 30 mins to brain storm 50 topics that I want to write about.
Then pick 3 best topics and further filter it down to 1 that I like the most to write about.
It saves me time to worry about what to write about
Never thought about doing it this way. Do you ever recycle topics that weren’t chosen?
I have a daily task to write down 2 blog post ideas. I’ve done it for a month now and I have over 60 ideas written. ☺️
This is also a really good idea. Do you concern yourself with SEO and keyword research?
Meh, not really... I just write the ideas down and then when I'm going to write the article I'll think about those (more or less 😄 )
I’ve tried this but never gotten much in the way of ideas. Is there something specific you do to find good topics this way?
These past weeks I've been thinking of putting into blog posts what I speak about in my public talks. For example, I tend to do talks about Open Source (20-40 min), I think that I can easily write blog posts talking about different sections/sub-topics of Open Source, from the talks I prepare.
Whenever I finally write the posts, it ends up being useful to at least one person 🤗 So even the smallest or simplest topic (from your perspective), can serve a great purpose.
I’d like to start doing talks to further elaborate on some of the posts I’ve written. Ive never thought about going the opposite direction with it!
It is interesting how people can end up doing the same things in opposite directions :P I started taking on opportunities to do talks because I wanted to spread the word on what I learned about Open Source and then I realized that talks are seen by a specific audience that can physically or virtually attend your talk... You have a much wider audience out there that can find your blog posts. So it seems a great and practical thing to do, to turn talks into blog posts :)
It’s definitely something I want to get into. I just don’t know how and there aren’t really meetups in my area.
As garyvee says: document, don't create.
Blog about what you just are learning now, what you are building. Share your journey! 😎
I am quite a quirky person. I am also an African woman in tech. There are so many barriers to overcome before we can talk and in some cases write code. I write about that journey.