How to pick topics for tech blogging

If you're a tech blogger(or any blogger in general) you must have faced this issue where you find yourself in a situation when you don't have anything to write about. You feel like a blank slate and got demotivated. This situation is called as a Writer's block.

Writer's block is a condition, primarily associated with writing, in which an author loses the ability to produce new work, or experiences a creative slowdown.

I've been blogging for three years now and I admit I've been to this situation many a times during this period. I wanted to write an article but I just didn't have a subject to write about. But then slowly, over the time, I've found some tricks using which I was able to find topics and once when I've a subject in hand, it's only a matter of researching on that topic and write about it. I'm going to list down those techniques in this article. Hope someone will find them useful.

Look into your day-to-day work

I'm a software engineer and I work mostly with PHP, JavaScript and things around these languages. So, the other day I was working on a feature and there came a situation where I needed to use PHP generators. This was the first time that I was using this feature. I've fixed the issue in my application using generators. But I wanted to learn more about it. So, I've researched more about it and the idea strikes! I got a subject to write about. I've written a whole article about generators. Basically, my thoughts, my take-on the subject.

You can find topics/subjects similarly. Just have a closer look at the work you do every day and you might just find the next subject for your article.

Go through the documentations

The other way that I'm following to bring ideas for my blog is to go through the documentation of things I work on. For instance, I work with Laravel a lot. I try to go to the Laravel's documentation, pick a certain topic from it and play around with it at least once a day. The benefit of this exercise is that I got to know more about Laravel and its features which I even didn't get chance to use in my work and in turn ideas to write articles. This applies to even language documentations as well. Who knows you might find a gem of a feature buried deep down into the documentation?

StackOverflow is your friend

You might have only visited StackOverflow.com looking for the answers that you'd only find there. But you might get surprised to know you can pluck some great ideas this Question-Answer site as well. What I do here is I go to StackOverflow.com, search for the topic that I'm interested in, let's say for instance "PHP", and apply the filter "Most Voted". This will enlist all the frequently voted questions of all time for that particular topic. For, instance here are few most is what I get when I search for "php".

As you can see, there are some really great questions from which you can pick one for your next article and give your take on.

Follow other developers' blogs

Finally, there's this formula. If you want to produce more, consume more. This fits perfectly with blogging as well. The more you read about other people's articles who writes in your niche, the more you'll get to know about the technologies around you, latest trends and what not? And in turn, you'll find some inspiration to write new articles for your blog.

If you want to produce more, consume more.

To get updated with the articles of my favourite bloggers, I use RSS Readers and subscribe to their RSS feeds. This way I don't misses out on their new article and also I get to read them as per my convenience.

In closing

I hope you'll find this tricks useful in finding your next article idea and let me know in the comments if you've some other tricks you use to get writing inspiration. Until then happy blogging!

Originally posted on https://www.amitmerchant.com/how-to-pick-topics-for-tech-blogging/