5 *Instant* Post Ideas You Can Use Today!
Writing content is not always a bed of roses, especially on a daily basis. You need time to properly research, tweak, and refine your posts to perfect.
One way to deal with the content production problem, is to squeeze in some quick and easy to create content in between your posts, so you can save time for proper research and post development.
Here are five post ideas that don’t require much effort on your part, and can be generated quite easily. Also, these kind of posts also often generate user participation. I use these ideas to fill up my blogging schedule, and you can too!
1: A Links Roundup
This is the easiest to create. Why not start a weekly links roundup(like I do, on Thursdays), and include links that you’ve stumbled upon, Dugg, or any other interesting content. It doesn’t necessarily have to be on topic.
Ask your readers too, and friends on social networks(Twitter, Plurk…) for
recommendations.
The main benefit, according to me, of doing these roundups is that you get traffic, from the trackbacks left on the articles you link to. And, authors often come back to your blog and leave a thank you comment for linking. That shows you’re a friendly blogger. 
2: Ask Your Readers A Question
If there’s one thing readers love and itch to do is to participate in a conversation, and make their points heard. I realized that myself only a week ago, when I started a weekly series called Monday Questions, in which I ask readers a question related to blogging, and let them answer and debate about the question. Got quite some attention too.
What could you ask your readers? Anything related to your niche. Try it, it will work.
3: Answer Reader Questions
The opposite of the above. Set aside a day of the week, like Daniel does, and who knows, it may become a hit!
If you’re trusted and credible enough in your niche, readers will ask you questions. If you know your stuff, you can easily answer these questions, or research and get done within a couple of hours. Try it!
4: Interview Someone
Interviews are a big reader attraction . Interviews aren’t that hard to conduct. You just need a set of questions, and someone to answer those questions.
You can interview anyone in your niche. Not necessarily someone well known, smaller ones work too. You’ll get some exposure, and the personality you interview will be quite grateful.
I’m also thinking of starting a monthly(or even weekly) interview series, in which I plan to interview little known, and new bloggers, to help them stand on their feet. If you’re interested in sitting on the hot seat, contact me!
5: Top {insert number here} Lists
Top {insert number here} lists are easy and fun to make. Also, they have the potential to be popular on Digg and other social media sites.
You could write a top 10 list for just about anything. Yesterday, I wrote Top 10 Tools and Firefox Addons For Digg, the first of a weekly top ten list.
Why not write a ‘top ten tools for notetaking’ for your productivity blog, or ‘top five methods to sew a scarf’ for your knitting blog. It really is that easy!
BONUS TIP : Conduct a Poll
This tip was suggested by Ranjani Ravi of The Voices Within. Thanks, Ranjani!
The idea is, you can conduct polls just about anything. Ask your readers what they’d like to read on your blog; how many RSS feeds they follow; how many scarves they’ve knitten in a day 
…
Readers love to participate, as I said above, and they’ll gladly vote on your poll too. I’ll be the first, but first tell me about it!
You could also set aside a dedicated ‘poll day’ and regularly hold polls about different topics. Democracy is a fantastic WordPress plugin to develop and manage your polls. PollDaddy is a free online service to make and manage polls.
What I Do
I implement three of these ideas on my blog, and it has saved me a lot of time, and has kept the atmosphere alive and running too. I post a Links Roundup every Thursday, a Top Ten list every Friday, and a Question every Monday. That leaves Tuesday and Wednesday, and on these days, I post my regular blogging tips posts. Such a blogging schedule allows me to research and tweak my posts, and also to store up posts for future, and sometimes even publish twice a day.
Your Turn
Do you have any ‘instant’ post ideas that you use and would recommend? We’d love to know!
Thanks to Jason Gulledge for the cover image of this post!
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These all are very nice ideas. I am doing Link Roundups… Q/A are always open. I have made a few lists before. I haven’t done any interviews… Never got a chance. But if I do … I will get an interview up there.
Great post! One superb instant idea would be to join sites like http://skribit.com where bloggers can get suggestions and readers can make suggestions. One other tactic would be to conduct polls regularly on what to write.
@rampantheart, thanks for the suggestion.
@balkhis
One of my favorite tricks to filling the void, when I don’t have much original to say, but still want to provide good content to my readers is to find other posts, like this one and share the info. I usually write a brief introduction, with a link to the original site.
It serves a few purposes, it delivers interesting content to my readers, and connects my blog to others with similar content. In a Web 2.0 world it is as much about the company you keep as the content you deliver.
What I like to do is take a current popular subject (like the olympics) and just make a list of interesting links about it. I guess it’s a little like a link roundup, but about a particular subject
And later, I’ll try to make a Quiz
great ideas. this is one of the more helpful posts that i have read today. i will certainly take these tips into consideration.
I always love asking other people questions, then they make the content for me
Thanks for the suggestions! I may start implementing them soon.
Best wishes,
Shannon
Guest posts is a cool idea, but I think we need to have some reputation before convince people to write for us.. isnt it?