How to Brainstorm for Coherent Ideas?

Brain­storm­ing is a dynamic, inter­ac­tive process of bounc­ing ideas off one another. Its pur­pose is to stim­u­late cre­ative think­ing and is best done in groups or with a friend with sim­i­lar interests.

I’ve stated this many times before that; some­times when you start writ­ing con­tent – it doesn’t really flow as smoothly as you would like it to. Indis­putably, I’ve expe­ri­enced a few such hic­cups myself but a sim­ple brain­storm can branch out and grow into an extra­or­di­nar­ily struc­tured piece of work.

How do you brainstorm?

I fol­low a sim­ple 4-step Brain­storm­ing process that reg­u­lates not just blog­ging minds, but cre­ative thinkers across the world. I was taught this tech­nique at the ten­der age of either or nine, but as the years packed on so did my under­stand­ing of brain­storm­ing and how crit­i­cal it is for pro­duc­ing excep­tional content.

The 4-step Brain­storm­ing Process;

1) Fill two pages of your jour­nal – If you fol­lowed my pre­vi­ous posts, I’ve blab­bered on about keep­ing a jour­nal — the same blab­ber­ing that received mixed reviews and opin­ion­ated responses, which I’ve accepted gladly.

Hav­ing said that, if you have decided to main­tain a jour­nal – take a topic or theme from your blog and plan to fill at least two pages with ideas, def­i­n­i­tions, opin­ions from other blog­gers or any­thing else you can find on the topic.

You can always get in touch with your read­ers and dis­cuss with them on the top­ics they would like to see you write. Per­haps a poll with key words? Then take a few of these key words, the ones that most promi­nently stand out to you and con­tinue on to step 2.

2) Look up Key­words in your the­saurus and dic­tio­nary. Spend some time on a dic­tio­nary or the­saurus. Per­son­ally, this is my favorite part of brain­storm­ing because learn­ing new words and def­i­n­i­tions allows me to explore areas that I wouldn’t even con­sider otherwise.

The idea is to write down 4 – 5 def­i­n­i­tions or syn­ony­mous phrases. When you think you’ve got enough def­i­n­i­tions and as you sift through you can move on to step 3.

3) Research! Research! Then More Research —  Use a search engine at your dis­posal to read other blogs in sim­i­lar niches to you. Frankly, it’s no secret – but I spend a lot of my time on ProBlog­ger and Shoe­Money because their style of writ­ing and their gifted abil­ity to con­nect with read­ers is extraordinary.

This is not as easy as it sounds, because many blog­gers that use this step tend to fall in to the pit­falls of imi­tat­ing their author’s con­tent. What does that mean? Well, if you are repeat­edly exposed to a sin­gle style of writ­ing, you unknow­ingly can adapt it. This can lead to a lack of unique­ness and will even­tu­ally force you to fall short of success.

I just wanted to make it clear because many new blog­gers tend to read so much con­tent from a hand­ful of top blog­gers, that they “copy” or “adopt” their writ­ing style. Take the effort to unearth your voice and your style!

4) Think what you want to read as a reader – Every now and then it helps just to sit down and think; “What do I want to read about?” You would be sur­prised how often you and your read­ers have a com­mon inter­est. I mean, they are your read­ers because they enjoy some­thing about you as a blog­ger, so there’s a good chance your inter­est com­ply with theirs

Don’t even break a sweat, ’cause that’s it!

Con­sider these four sim­ple steps before you start writ­ing because it has done won­ders for me. How­ever, it doesn’t guar­an­tee any­thing because end of the day, you need to explore your strengths and your weak­ness, so you can adapt a writ­ing tech­nique that will help you spark your imagination.

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