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One of the most useful and valuable tools a blogger could own is an idea journal. Having a constant flow of ideas is essential to keep writing quality articles and maintain your blog readership. In fact, for probloggers post ideas are directly link with their income. For them, running out of ideas may be dramatic and significantly impact their living.

I wrote some time ago an article titled 12 Effective Ways to Find New Article Ideas. In this article, I listed some ways to get new source of ideas. These sources are quite simple and may help you to fill up your idea journal with great ideas. Now, concerning your journal, Steven Snell wrote an interesting article on DailyBlogTips to help people maintaining an effective idea journal. This article is titled Keys to an Effective Idea Journal. You may take some time to read it; it may help you to improve the way you use and maintain your own journal.

Those 2 articles will give your great resources to maintain an effective idea journal. However, I would like to go a little bit further by giving you 5 additional tips. Those tips are more related to your journal structure and may influence the way you write your idea in your journal. The tips are the following:

1. Create Categories.

Creating categories may help you to better organize your ideas and to relate them to a specific topic. Of course, this may change later in time, but at least you’ll have an initial base. Using categories may also help you to avoid duplicates. I also recommend using a generic category like “General”, “Uncategorized” or something like that. This category will be useful to insert general ideas. In fact, the key here is that you better use a general category than dropping your idea because it doesn’t fit anywhere. Note that your categories must fit with topics relevant to your niche.

2. Create a Special Section For Article Types.

Sometimes you may have some idea related to a special type of articles. For example, you may have several “Top 10″ ideas. In fact, because you already have some elements in mind, the type of your article is clear to you. Thus, having a “Top 10″ section may help you to properly categorize your articles. Don’t forget to write the elements you already have in mind. For example, you may have 2 or 3 elements of your “Top 10″ article; write them down! Other potential article types could be “Reviews” or “How to”. Note that article types are not related to you niche.

3. Sketch Your Article Structure.

If you have any idea of your preliminary article structure, just write it down. You may want to take a look at the 4 Simple Rules to Increase The Quality of Your Articles. In that article, you’ll find a way to properly structure your article. Of course, sketching your first article structure is not a necessity at this point (when writing in your journal). However, if you have something in mind, you have to write it down immediately. It may not be your finale structure, but it will be great beginning!

4. Add an “Article Ready” Score For Each Idea.

You may want to add some kind of a “article ready” score to each of your idea. In fact, what I called “article ready” score is a code to let you know at which level you feel each idea ready to be exploited in a concrete article. This score could be anything you want. For example, it could be as simple as “L”, “M” and “H” that stand respectively for low, medium and high. For those who better like numbers, you may want to use a 0 to 10 scale. Thus, ideas that are clear in your mind may have a score of 7 or 8. In opposition, an idea that was just drop without any context or clarification may have a score of 2 or 3. This score may help you when you want to pick up an idea for a new article. Depending of the time you have, you may want to develop an idea with a score of 2 or 3. However, if your time is limited, you would probably prefer to develop an idea with a score of 7 and above.

5. Leave Sufficient Spaces Between Each Idea.

This one is a very simple tip, but very worthy. We all tend to write ideas very fast and we generally don’t leave spaces in between. Please, don’t do this anymore! Give you a lot of spaces between each idea. Those spaces will allow you to insert additional elements in the future. If you don’t give you this possibility, you’ll sooner or later own an unusable and illegible journal. The chances are that you will try to write with so little characters and you won’t be able to recognize them anymore. This is bad and this is way out from what you are expecting from your journal. Don’t hesitate to leave you enough spaces. In that context, remember that too much is better than not enough!

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 5:29 am and is filed under Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.