It can be tricky to come up with ideas for new blog posts. There’s a balancing act to achieve between making sure that you’re fairly consistent in your output in terms of number of posts per week/month, and the desire to maintain a certain quality – not just in the writing but in the relevance of the content to your audience.So when I heard about a new website that helps get feedback and ideas, I thought “Great, there’s a quick blog post right there!”.
Helpmewrite.co is a new site where bloggers can list potential titles of posts they’re thinking of writing, and then invite their audience of twitter followers to express an interest and vote for the ones they’d most like to read.
“Kickstarter for writing, without the money” is how the developers describe it.
Sounds good to me.
Here’s what I did:
- Signed in to Helpmewrite.co with my @StravaTips account
- Copied and pasted in a bunch of draft post titles from my huge list of draft or unfinished posts for scarletfire.co.uk
- Tweeted out to my followers
- Waited for a response. Casual browsers on helpmewrite.co can also vote if the title appeals to them, and it’s possible to vote anonymously if you’re not a twitter user.
- Announce an update to those people who voted, telling them when the article has been written.
Help me choose what to write next: helpmewrite.co/me/stravatips
— ScarletFire (@StravaTips) March 28, 2013
This is all very useful in itself (if people respond!), but I think once the site is more established it may serve other purposes too, such as:
- Getting ideas for blog posts, depending on what else appears to be attracting votes.
- People can make suggestions for you – things they think you should write about.
- Finding other people who are blogging about similar topics, potentially leading to collaboration and guest posting etc.
The main thing that the site lacks is a search facility to trawl through all the prospective post titles for specific keywords. It’s possible to search for people, but this strikes me as less useful than being able to search through the post titles.
I’d be surprised if they’re not already working on it.
The site is beautifully designed, and simple to use. The FAQ includes some more detail from the creators about their motivation and hints at possible directions the site could go in. It’s people like these that help make the web so vibrant and fresh, so drop by, take a look and support the project.
See my list of potential posts, and vote for which ones you’d like me to write next.
Bloggers – would you use this site?
Please feel free to share your own methods of getting ideas and feedback, in the comments.
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