How to Come Up with Your Next Blog Post (at the Last Minute)

Brainstorming new blog post ideas

For serious bloggers, the general rule of thumb is to have your blog posts planned out at least a month in advance. (Others will argue at least six months, but those tend to be the full-timers.) This limits the amount of frenzied writing, sloppy editing, and hair-fraying panic that can accompany writing. This is great in theory. But life has a bad habit of cluttering our schedules, and before you know it, that glorious time period where all of your posts are planned out, written ahead of time, and scheduled in advance has run out, and we're left scrambling to throw together a last-minute blog post to satisfy our readers.

Or maybe you're new to blogging, haven't even set up the website yet, and are frozen in terror because, what ? You're supposed to do this every week if you want a following? More? Where do you even start ?

Worry not, friends! Like so many other bloggers online, I am writing this post to help you answer that very question. When you're staring down the white screen of death, dreading the impending deadline, how do you come up with a juicy topic that will satisfy your readers?

I actually struggled with this question myself. Minutes before writing this very post. And several more times throughout my blogging career. Procrastination is a fine art, lovelies, one that I have mastered. As such, there are several tips that you can use.

Tip #1: Keep an Ongoing List

Earlier this week, I looked at my calendar with despair. At the end of 2018, I had planned out three months of blog posts. Three! And not just posts for this blog, but also for my monthly column The Bitch Shelf at Luna Station Quarterly, as well as my YouTube channel . I'd even been writing book reviews and writing tutorials weeks in advance to buy more time to work on the videos and stories.

But now that time was gone, and I hadn't refreshed the buffer zone. I now had to come up with a completely new topic, and I had to do it now if I wanted time to actually write the damn thing.

Luckily, I plan for such emergencies. I also have the habit of writing down every thought that goes through my head. Which is why I keep an ongoing list of potential blog posts in my journal.

For me, this list is divided in two parts: topics on how to write, and commentary on the SFF genre. Obviously I also do book reviews, too, but as I write those down as soon as I close the book and then schedule them as needed, they don't need to be listed.

Some topics never leave the list, because they can be written over and over again. My "Top Ten Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books" or "Favorite Horror Movies for Halloween" are constantly changing as I consume more media. I can bust those out every few months and they'll never grow old. Lists are an old favorite of bloggers for this very reason.

Other topics can really only be done once or twice (like "How to Come Up with Your Next Blog Post") before your audience gets bored, so it's important to keep this list up to date! Keep your journal handy wherever you go, especially if you're browsing your chosen topic online. If you're writing a blog about fishing, and you see a YouTuber give bad tackling advice to their audience, write down what that topic is so you can write a post about it later. Or if you read a post that brushes on a particular subject but doesn't really get into it as deeply as it should, write that down and come back to it later.

Ideas can come out of nowhere: random conversations with friends and family, reading a fantasy book and thinking Man, this author doesn't know shit about characterization , or even just going for a walk outside and suddenly getting hit with an idea while listening to Imagine Dragons. Keep a list. Keep it close. And when you're in a bind and need a blog idea fast , you'll have a bunch of options to choose from.

Tip #2: Ask!

Even if you don't have an established audience, you can always find people to just ask for ideas, or better yet, ask them what they want to read about . Facebook groups are my personal favorite.

Never be afraid to tell your readers that you've been hit with writer's block and need their help. In fact, readers love it. I know I do. Some of my favorite YouTubers are constantly putting up surveys asking "Which video do you want me to do next" with a variety of topics to choose from. It's great for the audience, because we get to actively participate and feel like we're being heard and cared about by someone we look up to. And it's great for the creator, because they get an insight into what their audience wants them to talk about.

You can also ask your readers at the end of each post something along the lines of "Let me know what other topics you'd like me to cover" or "Feel free to ask me any questions you have about XYZ!" This will be another source of potential blog posts that you know you readers will want to read about, because they're literally asking for it!

Tip #3: Interviews & Guest Posts

Interviews and guest posts with other bloggers (or authors if you're a book blogger, or parents if you're a parenting blogger, or whatever niche you're in) are helpful for a variety of reasons. One is simply sharing audiences. Guest posts can be key to building your audience, as you're basically using someone else's established blog as a springboard. You can go on their site with their regular traffic and talk about your blog, or you can invite them on your blog for a spike of traffic in the hopes that the new readers will stick around long enough to sign up for your newsletter. (This happened after I interviewed my mother, Maryjanice Davidson .)

But there's another reason that interviews and guest posts are a good idea, and that is strategic laziness. Once you've secured an interview/guest post to appear on your blog, your work is pretty much done. The other writer is the one who has to do all the heavy lifting! Once they send it to you, it's just a matter of minor editing, copy, and paste.

If you run a weekly blog like I do, this means that you get a whole other week to figure out what the next post is going to be, or in my case, quickly finish reading a book so I can review it in time. And like the ongoing list of blog post ideas, if you collect enough interviews and guest posts, you can store them away for emergencies or schedule them for busier weeks, thus giving you some breathing room while also keeping your readers satisfied. Plus you get a network connection and you're promoting a fellow blogger. Everyone wins!

Tip #4: If All Else Fails: Re-Publish

Republishing old blog posts is an underrated skill that a lot of bloggers forget about. So long as the post is old enough--at least four months minimum --then chances are your readers don't remember it and/or didn't even read it because of all the other stuff cluttering their email and social media feed. (That sounded pessimistic and vaguely insulting. Sorry.) It's perfectly acceptable to take an old post, dust it off with some minor updates and edits, and re-publish it.

As a matter of fact, I had planned on doing just that for the most recent Bitch Shelf article "Superhero Movies that Fight Toxic Masculinity." Originally, I was going to give them one of my first posts on this site, "Toxic Masculinity in Superhero Movies." But the thing is, LSQ has a pretty strict word count with its columnists, and my old post proved to be too long. I couldn't cut it down to size without losing vital information, so instead I focused on one part of the post: the ending. I had ended that post with a handful of superhero movies that, at the time, were the only ones I knew that actively fought or defied toxic masculinity. This was before Black Panther , Incredibles 2 , and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse came out.

So now I had a much more positive, better idea for an article that was better suited to the word count and got new information that hadn't been available two years ago. It took about fifteen minutes to write and send to LSQ--along with a second, panicked email a while later, because I had originally forgotten that Spider-Verse was a thing.

But other Bitch Shelf articles, especially the earlier ones, are copied almost directly from older posts. And that's totally fine! You can do that so long as you're careful with it.

What are some ways that you (or a friend of yours) come up with blog post ideas at the last minute? Let me know in the comments!

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