Your blog is like a hungry puppy waiting to be fed. It’s tummy is rumbling and you want to feed it regularly, but there are times when it can seem like there is nothing worth writing about.
Let’s say it’s craft show season and you’ve spent the last two weeks making a dozen of the same pink teddy bear. You’ve already shown the bear and talked all about it so what are you supposed to blog about this week?
Or maybe your studio space has been dismantled in advance of a move to a new city. How can you blog if you’re sewing machine is packed?
When you don’t feed the blog, though, you feel guilty. Will people forget about your work? Will you anyone still be there when you return?
Here are a few ideas to help you generate valuable blog posts that you can generate any time, no matter what is going on in your life:
1. Break your craft down into tiny steps. Write a post with 2-3 tips for doing
one of those steps well. This is how I came up with my post Two
Essential Tips for Sewing Thick Fabrics.
2. Pick someone whose work is really inspiring to you and share their work with
your audience (ask permission before resposting
images and be sure to credit them properly). This is how my Awesome
Handmade Toys series began.
3. Choose a single supply you couldn’t do your craft without and write about it. Something as
mundane as a great pair of scissors can make for great content if you explain
why this particular pair is so vital to your everyday work, show us how to use
it, and tell us where we can buy a pair. See my post about my
love of hemostats.
4. Think about an ongoing craft-related or business-related challenge you’ve
been facing. Describe your approach to solving that problem, what’s worked and
what hasn’t. It’s likely that at least some of your readers are in the same
boat. They’ll chime in to help out, or just commiserate with you, and that
builds community.
5. Choose a craft book that you love and write a review. It’s okay if the book
is old or if other bloggers have already written about. Explain specifically
why you feel it’s a valuable book, make a project from it, or critique it. This
was the idea behind my review of The
ABC’s of Teddy Bear Making.
6. Make something personal into something universal. If you’ve attended a craft
or blogging convention, like BlogHer or Sewing Summit, by all means write a
highlights post about the event. But follow-up with a post that would be useful
for a wider readership such as, “Is Attending a Convention Right For
You?”. Lot’s of people want to go, but they aren’t sure if it’s worth the
money or if they’ll fit in. Your post can help answer these questions.
7. Notice what people are complaining about or worrying about and weigh in on
one of those topics. I’ve noticed recently that people seem miffed when they
see one of their handmade products pinned on someone’s “DIY” board on
Pinterest. Observing people expressing annoyance at this occurrence has me
thinking about a post on this topic.
Do you have other post topics that you turn to when the well seems to have gone dry? If you do, please share! We could all use a good brainstorming session!
—–
Mark your calendars! On Monday, March 4, from 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm EST, I’ll be hosting the Crafterminds Twitter chat and we’ll be focusing on this topic: what to blog about when there’s nothing to blog about.
If you’ve never participated in a Twitter chat I’m personally inviting you to come to this one! All you need is a Twitter account. To join the chat head over to TweetChat, sign into Twitter there, and enter Crafterminds as the hashtag. TweetChat allows you to easilty follow the chat and chime in with your own thoughts in real time. I’m looking forward to a productive hour and I hope to see you there!
Hi Abby,
Thanks for these ideas. I have a really tough time coming up with something to write, with or without substance. There’s only so many posts you can make that say ‘look what I made, the pattern is great!’ before both you and your readers get bored. 🙂
Great ideas! When my crafty well goes dry, I usually do a recipe or a weather/nature report. Anything to get people to come back and visit.
Sometimes, I’ve been frantically trying to find something new on other people’s blogs to read and realize I’ve not posted for a few days.
So recipe it is.
Thanks for sharing your insights into so many areas. I love checking in on your blog because the information you provide can be used in a such a broad spectrum – from sewing to running a small business.
For instance, sewing for me is more of a hobby. While I enjoy learning about the different techniques and admire the craftsmanship of so many artists like yourself… my desire is to create digital artwork and hopefully sell it some day.
Today I’ve been struggling with what to write about on my blog this week when I popped over to your blog for a quick virtual visit. Your topic was perfect and on target. It got me to thinking so I decided to write about a new book I had just finished reading and a video tutorial I discovered by the author.
Thanks again!
These are all good ideas. I don’t really blog for business purposes (because my business mostly doesn’t exist), but they are still pretty handy!
I'm glad they are helpful! Whether you blog for business or pleasure, it can still be challenging some days to figure out compelling topic to blog about.
Hi Joyce,
Thank you! Curating content for your readers is a really valuable service. As an expert in your field, if you've read and evaluated a particular book or video and you can recommend it or critique it intelligently, that's so useful! Sometimes the best content is right there in front of us. We just have to see it and relay it to others.
Hi Amanda,
Do you want to know the most popular post of all time on this blog? My recipe for food processor bread. Yep. 8 years of blogging about softies, and it's the bread recipe that gets the most hits 🙂 Posting a recipe every now and then is not a bad thing at all!
It's true. Show and tell only goes so far. You kind of have to pull away and take things to a meta level, or a micro level, to find new material there. How do you evaluate a pattern before purchasing it? What kind of tracing wheel do you use? Why is one clear ruler better than another? These are bigger, and littler, questions that can expand you list of possible blog topics.
I should probably save this comment for your DIY pinterest post but I might forget. I’ve seen worse then just pinning as inspiration. I’ve seen people pin items from etsy which explain how to make them in the description. I think it’s horrible.
Thank you for this post – I struggle every week with blog content. This post was really helpful!!!!
Thanks for the ideas, Abby! They do help, especially when I’m tired of posting about tutorials or running out of ideas. Will try them, for sure.
Super!
Thank you for sharing this post.