Seven Ways to Find Great Article Topics

Working as an on-line article writer is fun and rewarding, but if you’re going to take it seriously as a job, it takes discipline. You’re not going to make much money if you write one article a week or one a month, you need to be turning out one or two a day. So how do you keep coming up with ideas for new, fresh, relevant and well written material? Here are seven ideas for ways to generate good subject matter, one for every day of the week.

1.  Write About What You Know

Whatever you do, you have an area of expertise that thousands of people would love to read about. That may be job related, if you’re a doctor, vet, lawyer, teacher etc. you have a broad base of knowledge from which to draw experience and offer advice.

If you’re a parent, you have advice to offer, even if it’s of the don’t-do-it-this-way variety. Are you religious? A pet owner? A sports enthusiast? Gambler? Vegetarian? Overweight? Your experience in any area can provide you with a rich source of material.

Make a list of the things that interest you, or that interest the people you meet in you. Do you always get asked the same questions? Turn the answers into articles. If the subject is big, break it down into a series. A series of six or seven articles around 750 words are easier to digest, and to write, than a single mammoth 4500-5000 word one.

2.  Follow the News

Use whatever channel you prefer to gather your news, but skim the headlines on a daily basis at least. Look for anything that connects to your area of knowledge, and use the news as a hook, then provide the background knowledge. A good example of this from today’s headlines (15th September 2009) would be following on reports of the death of the actor Patrick Swayze from pancreatic cancer. Say you’re a film buff, you could provide a filmography with brief reviews of his work. If you’re a doctor, you could explain in simple terms what pancreatic cancer is, how it progressed for him, and how readers can minimise their chances of succumbing to the disease. But Swayze was also a ballet dancer and a pilot, opening even more avenues for potential material.

3. Predict Seasonal Interest

Following the news is all well and good, but interest flits from subject to subject so fast in the internet, there is always the danger the tide will have moved on by the time you get your article published and promoted. It can feel as if you are forever one wave behind the swell. Wouldn’t it be great to be in front now and then?

But of course you can be, if you write seasonal articles before the interest peaks. Think about what’s coming up in the next few weeks. The perfect example now is Halloween, followed by Christmas. So now is the time to write those articles about finding or making the perfect costume, child safety awareness issues, budgeting for the festive season etc. Writing for calendar events anything from a week to a couple of months in advance can help your articles rise in popularity and stay there a little longer.

4. Research Constantly High Interest Topics

Of course some topics just never go off the boil. People will always want ideas for making or saving money. Health and diet issues are perennially popular, as are dogs, cats and other animals. Even if you have no edxpertise in any of these or other popular areas, that doesn’t mean you can’t learn some. Find a popular topic that interests you, research it and become, if not an expert, at least a well informed amateur. Then share what you have learned. 

One word of advice though, don’t limit your research to on-line sources. Visit your local library, or take an evening class, and gain some real world experience and knowledge to add to the already existing on-line pool. Otherwise your articles might end up sounding like a rehash of a thousand other samey pages. Worse still, you might inadvertently find yourself adding to a pool of erroneous information. 

5. Don’t Forget About Offline

Which brings me to the next point. It’s easy when writing for an on-line channel to draw inspiration exclusively from on-line sources. After all, they’re easy to reference and quote from by simply copying and pasting into your article. But information already available on-line to you is also available to your readers.

Take an offline newspaper, read a few books, learn from real life. Then bring that knowledge on-line. Look through the lesser stories of a local paper, be they humorous, absurd or indicative of a wider trend. Use these lesser known examples to tie into the hot topics of the moment.

An example might be bringing examples of hardship highlighted in your local rag to a wider audience by using them as your reference material in an article on the credit crunch.

6 Have an Opinion

If you’re writing news articles, it’s customary to try to avoid expressing personal opinions. Use of the word ‘I’ is discouraged, to the point where writers use the faintly absurd terms “this reporter” when talking about themselves in hard news. (e.g. This reporter learned today) But if you’re writing about less topical subjects, sometimes it doesn’t hurt to express an opinion. That opinion might be controversial, unpopular, or more in keeping with the prevailing mood, but it can lead to others quoting you directly, and that in turn can increase links toy our articles and therefore raise your profile. Just be careful not to make libelous remarks about other people, unless you want to suffer the consequences.

7 Compile a List

An outreach of the opinion, and a hugely popular format for articles is one like this, complied as a list. Your list could be a subjective one, such as ”My 10 Favourite Holiday Destinations” or a more generic  ”31 Quick Money Saving Tips.” Or your list could be statistical and fact based, such as “The 10 Most Popular Films of All Time.”

If you can, tie this list into a breaking news theme, how about “The Top 10 Quotes from Patrick Swayze Films?” I’ll even give you one to get you started: 

“Nobody puts Baby in a corner”