What To Do When You Have Nothing To Post?

You are staring at the computer screen with your hands on the keyboard motionless. Your brain is coming up with nothing for your next blog post. It's only been a couple of months, you can't be out of topics yet. You decide to not post anything that day, but tomorrow comes and your mind is still blank. What happens now once you have nothing to post?


Image courtesy of Adam Lyon

This is a common problem for many writers not just bloggers. So if you find that posting something on a regular schedule, here are a few remedies that will hopefully help smash through that writers block.

Get out of your current surroundings.
Take a walk or go to the store. Just getting out of your house, or wherever you blog should get your mind off of the need to blog and get your brain out of a rut. I did this back in high school and college when I was writing essays. I would work on it for a little bit but would start to despise the topic I was writing on. When I put it down and got my mind off it, I was able to come back and write with a new sense and a fresh mind.

Talk to friends, family members, or members of your internet community.
Maybe someone has heard of something new about your topic that you haven't. Or if you have something you want to write about but just can't think of which direction to take it, just ask someone. Forums are a great place for this especially if you have decent presence there. Generally are more than willing to help especially if they know something about whatever you are writing about.

Research.
If you aren't researching your posts already than you should start. Sometimes doing a bit of extra research about the topic to hopefully find some untapped bit of information that will give you that extra push over the hill. This can be surfing the internet for more sources or opinions about the topic or going to the library and looking up books and older information to write about. Make sure you keep track of the sources as you don't want to plagiarize.

Revisit older posts and update them.
When you generally post something it won't be the last time you talk about that topic. Just going through your old posts and adding extra bits of information will improve your blog. Not only will it move older posts back up to the front page of your blog, but it will keep your blog updated with the most relevant information. It will also interconnect your blog posts with links to other posts you have done, which is something that is good to do (as it keeps your readers within your site as long as possible).

The best thing to remember is that it happens to everyone at some point. It's just something that you have to try and push through. Just as I'm about to post this, I whipped over to ProBlogger and searched to see if Darren had written about this subject. He had not only written about it, but quite possibly wrote a small book about the subject. Check out his article written about battling bloggers block.