Every now and then, I see yet another article or blog posting promising a whole slew of article/blog post idea sources. What writer can really resist glancing through them… even though years of experience wasting time with those lists have taught me that I can always sum up what they contain in a single tip:

Keep your eyes and ears open — ideas can come from anywhere.

Yup, the lists typically include everything. May as well just hand you a dictionary to poke through for “inspiration.”

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Well, let’s see if we can change that with this post. I’ll just give you my top 2 sources of ideas for articles and blog posts. And they’re can’t miss sources at that. I only use them the few times I’m coming up dry and there’s a looming deadline. But really, they never fail. The first is something I’ve relied on for decades, now that I think about it. The second is a more recent “courtesy of the Internet” thing.

Source #1: Quotations. Get yourself a book of quotations, one indexed on keywords (that’s critical). Stuck? Just go through the quotes on the subject you’re supposed to be writing about. The quotes are short, the reading quick. If a keyword produces nothing, jump to another related keyword.

Although, as I said, I’ve been using this source for decades, the Net has actually “enhanced” it. Just go to sites like The Quotations Page and keyword search away. Get a quotations book for your desktop or library anyway… you never really know when your Net connection’s going to go down. Besides, I occasionally like to do serendipitous searches just flipping randomly through the pages, an experience that nothing on the Web can really duplicate.

Source #2: EzineArticles.com. Yup, the free articles site. It has now grown to such proportions that keyword searches are usually fruitful. In many cases, you don’t even need to do a keyword search — the content’s categorized well and intelligently enough that just clicking around often suffices.

This source is particularly suited for freelancers looking for article ideas they can pitch to paying publications. If you monitor the articles being released (which happen quite frequently and regularly for many of the categories), you’ll sometimes even notice topical trends, giving you some kind of unofficial “what’s hot” kind of insight.

And here’s one “feature” that’s actually more helpful than it would seem: Although the articles give you a good headstart on your work — ideas can’t be copyrighted, else all those articles on the very same thing on the EA site itself are all infringing on each other — most of what you’ll find there are poorly written or so-so at best, and decidedly on the less filling “lite” side info-wise that, really, it’s really difficult to get much more than just the idea from most of what’s there.

This means that you’ve often still got quite a bit of work to do even after visiting the site. But as a source of ideas, it’s tops.

So, what are your sources?

— EES

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