If you’ve been following this series then you have done your market research, picked your niche, setup your blog and now you’re ready to start blogging… but what do you write about?

Well, if you picked a subject that you know well and are passionate about you should have no problems coming up with inspiration, especially for the first few weeks, but you really want to be a little more organised than simply sitting down at your keyboard and starting to type!

In the words of Alan Lakein, “Failing to plan is planning to fail” so what we want is a system where we can plan our posts logically. Luckily there are a couple of great methods which you can implement freely and easily which will mean you are never short of something to write!

RSS feeds and Google Reader

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it’s a way of sharing your data.  Many sites, and virtually all blogs have an RSS feed which we can subscribe to and consume all that information, from many sites, quickly and efficiently in one place.  The first thing we’ll need is an RSS reader and the one I suggest is Google Reader.  It’s free and easy to use so head over to Google Reader and set up a free account.

Now every time you’re at a site with an RSS feed you can choose to subscribe to it by clicking on the (usually) orange button.  Give it a try right now – click here or on the RSS button for this site.  In fact there are several on this page – the Entries RSS at the top of the sidebar, the Subscribe button at the bottom of this post, and your browser will probably have a subscribe button on or near the address bar.

When you’ve clicked on the button choose ‘Subscribe with Google Reader’ and now each time you open your Google Reader you’ll be able to keep up to date with this blog.  Now all you need to do is visit all the blogs which interest you in the same niche as your own, and subscribe to their RSS feeds.  See how powerful this is?  Once you’ve done that you just go to Google Reader and you’ll have a constant stream of fresh on-topic information to inspire you!

Google Alerts is your friend

My other favorite way of keeping my finger on the pulse is with Google Alerts.  Head over to Google Blogsearch and do a search on your keyword.  Now scroll to the bottom of the page and you’ll see a link called “Create an email alert for [keyword]“.  Now just enter your email address and how often you want to be alerted (daily, weekly etc.) and now you’ll get emails telling you about who is blogging about your keyword!

So there you go, two very powerful ways to keep up to date with what’s going on online, and get inspiration about what to blog about.  Tomorrow we’ll take a look at how you promote your blog and start getting traffic!