Blog Food: A recipe for a better blog series

Is your blog starving to death? Are you not providing your blog the basic essentials it needs to stay healthy?

The rest of this week, I’ll be bringing you tasty morsels of food for your blog. Each day I will reveal a different ingredient that will help you cook up a better blog.

This is a basic blog recipe that anyone can add to, enhance and personalize. The best chefs are known for taking a basic recipe and adding a twist to make it their own. That’s a lot like what bloggers must do everyday when it comes to the challenge of baking up enough fresh content to sustain a blog.

Blog ingredient #1: Passion

Without this first ingredient, no matter how many substitutes you attempt to make, at some point you’ll loose steam and the batter will collapse. That’s because if you don’t love what you’re blogging about eventually you’ll come to a point where you can’t force feed it any longer – you’ll get tired of the same old thing and before you know it, you’ll throw that pot right out the window.

Passion is what will keep you motivated even when things aren’t working out as planned. It will inspire you when you least expect it and will enable you to enter a state of flow that will let you to work for hours on end without ever getting tired or even realizing that amount of time has passed.

But how do you know if you have enough passion to feed your blog?

Here’s a good test, remember Bubba from Forest Gump and how passionate he was about shrimp? It took him weeks to list all the different ways you could add shrimp to a meal…shrimp gumbo…shrimp stew…fried shrimp…shrimp salad…

When you have passion about something, you can think of infinite ways to add zest to the same old shrimp and you would never lose your appetite for them.

What does this have to do with blogging? If you can’t think of more than a few ways to discuss the topics associated with a particular niche, then perhaps you just don’t have the passion for it. That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you, it just means you don’t have the palette for that particular niche, so just pick something else that you truly care about.

Measure your passion for a topic with by creating a brainstorming web – this shouldn’t be new, you’ve probably done this in school a thousand times. Simply start with your topic and draw a line to every subtopic you can think of, then repeat the process.

If you’re not comfortable with that you can simply create a list of possible topics and just keep adding to it like Bubba did.

Everyone has passion

I believe everyone has a passion for something. You’re probably thinking, I’d like to write about XY&Z, but that niche isn’t as profitable as AB&C. I believe with the right volume of passion, you can make any niche profitable, but you’ll have to think outside the box for creative ways to monetize your blog.

Sometimes the income your blog earns happens offline. I don’t really care exactly where the money comes from as long as it ends up in my account. Most of the income I was able to generate last year was NOT from adsense or affiliate sales. I maintain my Christian blog solely because it’s my passion. However, I made most of my income doing freelance writing for websites and local business owners who were impressed by the writing on that blog and was a direct result of maintaining and producing quality content. If you were to look solely at sales generated online, you’d think my blog was a flop, but I know otherwise.

How do you turn up the flame on passion that’s fizzling out?

• Sometimes you need to get fired up by reading controversial topics surrounding your niche that you disagree with. You could write a series of new posts that refute the argument. Stirring in a good helping of emotion is a great way to spice things up.

• Sometimes you need to open up the deep freeze and through all the cold hurt and useless items. It’s easy to get attached to old ideas, we don’t want to throw them out because we’ve been intending to use them – sometimes you just need to start fresh. Remove the clutter in your head associated with

• Sometimes you just need to gain new and fresh perspective. That may mean you need to dig a little deeper and do some more research.

Okay, I know people hate the word research – so let me rephrase: spend some time reading what other people have to say about your niche. Visiting other blogs is a good way to start, but don’t forget to visit the library sometimes. You’ll find lots of overlooked material there simply because people have gotten too lazy to get up and go to the library.

A lot of what I learned about blogging, came from actual books I found in the library. Just make sure to limit your reading to books that have been published in the last 1-2 years – you can extend that to five years if you can’t find anything within that time period.

Here’s some posts to get you started with research for developing passion, but before you go, please add some suggestions that might help new bloggers recognize and fire up their passion for blogging.

How passion can transform your blog

5 Simple ways to find your passions

Be sure to return tomorrow for the next essential blog ingredient…

Image: Suat Eman / FreeDigitalPhotos.net