How to decide what to blog on

This article’s title sounds like a no-brainer, but it actually isn’t.

Most people start blogging to express themselves, whether through random thoughts, or as a way of keeping daily records of their lives or travels, by writing poetry or short stories or by putting up their photographs.

In most cases what begins as a mish mash of things slowly but surely begins to take a shape. After making several posts, the blog begins to take on a distinct personality. It becomes a blog on a certain topic, subject, issue, reason, genre or even of a certain kind of tone (say humorous or sarcastic).

For most people it gets very difficult to decide beforehand what they are exactly going to blog on. What their blog’s topic or even tone and style will be. All of this develops as the blog develops.

This article will give all the regular netizens and blogging newbies simple guidelines on how to decide what to blog on. It will act like a simple guide on how to choose a blogging topic, subject, genre or tone.

By sheer common sense, the simplest way to decide on what your blog topic should be is through elimination. Let us begin by eliminating one of two basic kinds of blogs – the personal blog and the non-personal blog.

Very broadly, blogs can either be personal or non-personal. Personal blogs are about your own thoughts, views, artistic self-expression through art, music, poetry, videos or anything at all of a personal nature.

Non-personal blogs are based on anything that is not of a personal nature. It could be on other people’s views, thoughts, lives, art, music, interests etc. and may or may not have your own added views in them.

Let us take examples to explain this better. Suppose you start a blog in which you write about your experiences while traveling across the world, it becomes a blog about you, and what happened to you. It becomes a personal blog.

On the other hand if you have a blog that is centred on the best movies being released in Hollywood, it become a non-personal blog. Even if you express your views on these movies, they are non-personal, because your main subject is not you, or anything created or written basis your own experiences or self-expression.

Well, let us now assume that you have eliminated non-personal blogs. Now you are left with the arena of personal blogs. Personal blogs can be broadly and very rudimentarily divided into three types – your experiences, any form of self-expression or your personal views.

If you now decide to eliminate self-expression and personal views, you are left with experiences. Blogs on personal experiences can of many kinds, but let us for the sake of simplicity take these: Travel experiences, Daily experiences, Professional experiences, Recreational experiences, Spiritual Experiences, Relationship experiences.

Suppose you zoom in to recreational experiences, then you have a plethora of choices – eating experiences, partying experiences, sports experiences, cinematic experiences, theatre experiences and others.

Now, lets us suppose that you decide to eliminate all except eating experiences. You have finally come down to a very specific topic to blog on. You will blog on all the gastronomic experiences you have in the course of your life. Be it eating in an obscure restaurant in your home town, or having the local food of Hawaii or the special dinner your wife cooked. You will be writing on your experiences with food, and that becomes the topic of your blog.

Quite simple, but there is the hurdle of a large number of choices. However this hurdle becomes a blessing, because you will never be able to identify all the choices, and will maybe identify only a few of the. The good thing about that is that is that if you could not think of certain choices, it is because you actually aren’t even interested in them. Thus they get automatically eliminated.

Similarly if you had eliminated personal and chosen non-personal, you would go about in a similar manner to eliminate the choices and reach the right one. As a rudimentary example, we could say that there are choices like celebrity, technology, finance, books, nature etc. Using the same method as we did for the personal blogs, and with your imagination and common sense, you will be able to quickly find out exactly what you want to blog on.

So, happy blogging, and choosing what you want to blog on.