Article Idea Tip

[Celeste Stewart]

I'm one of those who likes to turn stuff I'm already researching and dealing with into articles. In another thread I was talking about how I plan on writing an article about cleaning dryer vents (how exciting). If you have a way of looking at your recent search engine searches, you could see what you've been searching for lately and perhaps put your newfound knowledge to work.

Bing has a "Search History" pane that lists your most recent searches (unless you've disabled it or cleared it). For example, if your search list includes entries such as "finding a good locksmith" or "evicting a roommate" how might you put what you've already researched to work for you? Any potential articles that you could write? If you have search histories available, take a look and get inspired. You already did the research so now all you need to do is write. If you don't have this info, try to remember what you've searched for lately and then keep a notebook by your computer. Every time you are curious and Google something, write it down and think about future articles that you could write. Chances are if you're searching for information, so are lots of other people - and webmasters too!

[Blair]

Excellent tips, Celeste.

Something I find helpful is to look at past work and explore different aspects of it. For instance, I write how-to articles for a regional home reno magazine (at least I hope I still do...my last cheque is overdue and I heard they were in financial difficulty ), but they aren't interested in the basics. So I've written countless articles where a knowledge of framing is assumed, but I've never written anything on framing. The thing is that I know from bitter experience there are a lot of people out there who don't know how to frame properly. I have to deal with their crooked walls, tilting decks, and beer-induced fantasies of carpentry for much of my building work.

I can't really blame them. Short of taking an actual carpentry course, there really aren't a lot of resources that go over the basics. It's just kind of assumed to be something that everybody knows how to do.

So when I'm writing things on spec, one of the subjects I can always go back to are some of the basics of carpentry. More than that, it works on a lot of levels. I can write basic how-to's, but there's a lot of comedy in there and I've also been offered the opportunity by a photographer friend to collaborate a comedy book on the DIY crowd.

The same applies to photography. There is a lot out there on how to compose a photograph, and even more on how cool digital cameras are, but there's not a lot on the discipline of proper exposure, the use of lighting, etc.. The result is that a lot of people spend a lot of time toiling with Photoshop when they'd rather be out shooting photos.

So if you've got expertise in one or two areas and find that something is missing from what you usually write, or you notice a skill or knowledge gap in one of those areas that isn't usually addressed, you can mine it for articles.

[cashwriter]

I have a folder on my hard drive inside my "Articles" folder called "Ideas". This morning I only had two ideas left in there, and started brainstorming for more. Most of the articles I won't have to do much or any research for, but there are a few that will need minimal research. I now have 42 ideas (all I do is create a blank Word document with the idea as the title). Funny enough, after all of that, I ended up writing a 1000+ word article this morning on a completely different subject that just popped into my head! Normally I will leave an article in the "Ideas" folder until it is completed. If I get partway through and don't have time to finish or I'm burnt out on the topic, I leave it in there to be completed later!

[EricScott]

Celeste,
I saw earlier today that you wrote your article about dryer vents - good luck with the article. It proves to us newbies that we really can write quality articles on just about anything we do throughout the day. I would have posted this earlier but after reading your article I got paranoid and spent an hour cleaning my dryer vent and laundry room

[Celeste Stewart]

Hey, if I can prevent one clothes dryer fire, that was time well spent writing My dryer vent guy called me this afternoon to see if I was satisfied and I definitely am. The dryer only takes one cycle (not three to four) to dry a load. I thought I needed a new dryer, so the cleaning saved me a ton of money already. I bet my electric bill will be much lower this month, too. And eventually, the article will help pay the inital cleaning bill.

I just now finished writing about replacing a laptop keyboard after replacing mine last night. It's nice not to have sticky keys anymore. The whole left side of my keyboard was going fast. The problem now is that I'm in the habit of stopping everytime I hit the 'e' key because for the last week or so I had to stop and pry it back into position. Anyhow, when the article sells, it will pay for my keyboard replacement - yay! Later this weekend I'll write about replacing individual keys or maybe cleaning the keyboard. Since I have the old keyboard, I can really get in and pry off those keys.