It doesn’t really matter if you read a thousand articles on how to structure your blog posts or how to promote your blog, your blog is nothing without good content. You come up with good blog content depending on what your blog is. A news or corporate blog will report on latest events. Other types of blogs will often times have content based on thoughts, opinions, and ideas. This post will talk about the latter type of blogs.

The best blogging ideas come from observation. I will demonstrate this with a hypothetical situation.

Let’s see a friend shows you some sort of invention he created. You might have an idea how to improve it, thoughts on how to use it to it’s maximum efficiency, or opinions on who the target audience is for this invention.

Now let’s say that when the friend called you over to see the invention, you said you couldn’t come. You would probably not have those thoughts, opinions, and ideas until somebody else wrote a blog post about your friend’s invention. By that point, if you tried to blog about it, your blog post may seem unoriginal if other people have already published their thoughts, opinions, and ideas.

This is the reason that some FriendFeed users say that “noise” is good.

Now that you know that you should go out and find stuff to blog about, the next big mistake is not blogging about it. Way too many times have I seen something before other bloggers did and didn’t blog about it.

On the flip side, you can’t blog about everything due to time and the fact that you could be seen as attempting to post regularly by filling your blog with bad content. You have to maintain a delicate balance between blogging about the most mundane thing and failing to blog when you are the first to see something really cool.

So, how do you know if you’re the first see something really cool? Think about it for a second…

That’s right! You Google it! Googling something not only prevents you from making posts about stuff that others have known for years, but you also become more knowledgeable on the topic.

Now I’ll tell you the key to observation is to look at something in a different way. This is basically the idea behind lolcats. In creating a lolcat, the person that sees a picture thinks “Hmm, the cat looks like it wants a cheeseburger…”

Summary:

• The best blogging ideas come from observation
• You actually need to observe to get blogging ideas
• Do not blog about the most mundane observations
• Google stuff to see if everybody else has talked about it two months ago.
• Look at stuff in different ways to get interesting observations.