Every blogger’s dream is to consistently create great content that’s new, unique, and compelling. It won’t go anywhere without inspiration or source material. What can you do when you’re stuck, particularly when you need good ideas for your blog or other types of creative content?

Take heart. Don’t panic.

Three basic ways of finding good ideas include:

  • The solitary search
  • Idea collisions
  • Collaboration and feedback

Let’s look at each method.

The solitary search

There are different ways that we can look at finding and developing ideas as a solo prospector:

  • Seeing greatness in a block of stone (sculptor) or in a piece of driftwood (carver/whittler) and hammering, chipping, or whittling it out.
  • Sowing seeds of facts and thoughts that, given the right conditions, will yield life (I think of this process as cultivating the Fields of Awe)
  • Fishing for ideas in a sea of inspiration (just don’t deplete the stocks without giving them a chance to replenish themselves!)
  • Panning for gold (tedious straining and searching to find a limited supply of tiny nuggets amongst a lot of dirt, mud, and water)
  • Sweating it out and trying to force something good out (happens all too often in a process that is somewhat comparable to constipation of the mind)

Sometimes you find something of value lying in wait, just waiting to be picked up and used. It can be rewarding when you find something good, but it can be pretty lonely when you can’t find what you are looking for.

Idea collisions

Good things, however, often do result from the collision of ideas. In his book On Writing, Stephen King tells the story about how he matched two seemingly unrelated concepts to produce the core concepts behind his novel Carrie. Idea collisions, the combination of ideas that fit together in an unexpected or unusual way, have been a successful source of material for content creators. Sometimes it does pay to mix and match.

On the flip side, Seth Godin’s book Meatball Sundae spends a lot of time talking about how marketing, and business itself, needs to be different to match the Web 2.0/Business 2.0 marketplace. He suggests that it’s a bad idea to apply new marketing techniques (which resemble the tasty toppings on a sundae) to boring old business (making “meatballs”, as he puts it). In his opinion, meatball sundaes – the combination of things that may be good separately, but don’t work together – are bad ideas. These two things just don’t go together.

Idea collisions can produce interesting combinations that fuel further creativity. Just make sure you do train a critical eye, and apply common sense, on the results at some point before locking in.

Collaboration and feedback

You can take the search for inspiration in a different direction by looking at locations or communities where conversations and ideas flow at a breakneck pace, such as the various types of social media sites and applications that exist today. I’ve talked about a few of them at this blog, like:

  • other blogs, with or without RSS feeds
  • Twitter
  • bookmarking
  • lifestreaming
  • comments
  • links of all kinds
  • offline publications (books, magazines, newspapers, newsletters, etc.)
  • television programming
  • movies
  • radio/podcasts

The most amazing thing about social media is that it brings people together who might not ever meet. I regularly link to and get links back from people who I only know by the images they post and the words that they produce from their keyboards. Through different types of conversations we can find multiple areas of common interest and these discussions sometimes act as the spark to ignite a creative firestorm of your own. And you don’t even have to be in the same room.

You might not see yourself as a John Lennon or Paul McCartney, or any of the other famous songwriting collaborators, but you can’t deny that there’s magic there. And one of the coolest feelings that you can experience is when you and your collaborator feed off each other’s concepts and jointly create something remarkable.

Now that we’ve covered these three basic techniques, here are a couple of other things to consider:

Make new or renewable resources

Occasionally we give back to the social media community, whether it’s an attempt to provide lists of blog post ideas to help someone who’s struggling with their own content, or creating resource lists of places to find inspiration. I think this is a very worthwhile practice.

Example 1 – amongst Chris Brogan’s amazing body of work, he’s created not just one but two great resources for blog post ideas. And he’s one of hundreds of people to do that for the community.

If you’ve found a tool or technique that helps to stimulate the creative processes, don’t hesitate to share it!

Example 2 - Darren Rowse regularly shares techniques with his readers: his post on mind mapping is just one example.

Parting thought

If you’re struggling, don’t let it get you down. There’s a lot of help available out there on the Web that you can find without too much work. Hopefully a few of these resources will help.

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