Amazon offers subscriptions to blogs within their Kindle platform. Every day when your readers wake up, your new content is waiting on their Kindle. Since the Kindle home screen’s default setting is to show newest content first, you could be the first thing they see every time they look at that home screen. How’s that for visibility?

And there isn’t much competition in your niche yet.

Unlike on the web, blogs must be registered to show up in the Kindle blog listings. Whereas a Google search for “arts & entertainment blog” returns 438,000,000 results, on Kindle, there are just 3, 481 titles.

Top-Level Category Blog Statistics

This is your competition today (Feb 11, 2011)

All Blogs: 11,734 titles

Arts & Entertainment: 3,481 titles

Business & Investing: 2,151 titles

Humor & Satire: 1, 535 titles

Industry Focus: 1,753 titles

Internet & Technology: 2, 963 titles

Lifestyle & Culture: 5,592 titles

News, Politics & Opinion: 2,754 titles

Regional & Travel: 1, 107 titles

Science: 760 titles

Sports: 934 titles

Since Amazon lists these titles by largest subscriber numbers, it would be a very smart idea to register your blog and start promoting it now. This will ensure your place on the first page of results.

Do it now, while the competition is still scarce!

I just took 30 minutes and came up with 16 blog topics – some of which will become three or four posts as I begin to write – and they are all things that my target readership feels passionate about.

That’s 3-4 weeks’ worth of hot blog topics for half an hour of work – and it was fun, too.

Blog Topics For Your Niche – Free!

It’s a little sneaky, but I don’t mind admitting it: I eavesdropped.

Generating Ideas Through Social Media Snooping

I used my favorite social network of the moment -Twitter – to find out what my potential readers are craving. And here’s how (it’s so simple that if you’re not already doing this, you’re going to kick yourself).

• Go to Search.twitter.com and typed in a keyword (in this case “writing”).
• Read 3-4 pages of complain-y and celebratory Tweets that contained your keyword.
• Make lightning-fast notes about the teeny sub-topics each Tweet represented, and how you might address them.
• Pop them into a mind-map document and add sub-topics to them as the ideas occurred to you (I use IThoughtsHD on my iPad. You could also use XMind or a simple spreadsheet or bullet list. I recommend Google Docs because you can access them from anywhere you have an internet connection, and you never know when you’ll have a spare half hour to compose a blog post.)
• Whenever your typing slows, go back to the search results page and look for another topic. The point of this exercise is to capture only ideas that interest both your and your readers. If you’re bored so are they. Move on.

Why Snooping Is Better Than Surveying

Sure, I could have sent out a request asking my readers what they wanted to know.

The problem with asking people for their opinions is that they

1. think about it for too long
2. want to impress you because you were nice enough to ask for their opinion or
3. are too busy to answer and  you end up only getting responses from the people who aren’t your real customers.

By snooping on social media, you have access to the raw, knee-jerk, 140-character exclamations of your audience when they are delighted, outraged, pissed off, passionate. In other words, you are finding out what they really care about.

And doesn’t that sound like the perfect launch-point for your next blog post?

Beyond Twitter

If you are writing a business blog, you might be better off searching through Linked In status updates. If you are writing for an industry niche, check out the most active industry forum online (you know the one).

If you’re really stuck, really in a hurry, and don’t need topics targeted specifically to your customers, check out Chris Brogan’s Blog Topics Service: it’s not free but it’s not an outrageous amount to invest in your business, either.

If you exhaust this technique and are ready to be a little overwhelmed, take a look at Copyblogger’s 50 Can’t Fail Tecnhiques for Finding Great Blog Topics.

Keep Up The Good Work

Life moves quickly.

Don’t waste your time coming up with more than a month’s worth of post ideas at a time. For all we know, some kind of seismic shift might occur in two months that will change the way you and your readers look at the world. You’ll want to write about that instead of whatever matters to you today.

Commit to doing this idea-generating exercise once a month.

Store the information somewhere that is easy for you to access (Google Docs, or just email it to yourself)

Throw out old ideas that no longer excite you.

Oh, and write the damned articles and post them every day.

I use WordPress to host and run my websites.

(It started as blog-hosting software but works as a Content Management System too. The Wall Street Journal’s site is built on its software, for example).

Lots of people more technically-skilled than I have written lots of little programs, called plug-ins, that help me make my website do cool things without having to write the code myself¹. Some of these things I could do myself, but plug-ins make it easier, quicker and automated. ²

Plug-ins let me do everything from put headlines in my sidebars, to helping me track how many people visit which article, to creating sign-up forms, and create those cute little ‘link to me’ buttons at the top of this article. Here are the ones that allow me to build websites that make my clients go “ooooh!”

Must-Haves

Google XML SiteMaps

This makes it easier for Google to index your pages (i.e include you in their search results)

Google Analytics For WordPress

This inserts the “Google Analytics” code wherever it needs to be in your site (usually in the header or footer of the code, which you don’t necessarily want to go digging around in unless you know what you’re doing. Trust me. A misplaced semi colon can bring grown men to tears!)

Google Analytics is an amazing (free) tool that tracks how people get to your website, where they go, how long they stay, where in the world they are, what keywords they searched for to get to you (and therefore what you should be including on more of your pages)…and so much more. It presents the information in all kinds of cool ways: graphs, overlays, tables. Go. Sign up.

Being able to tell clients exactly what’s going on with traffic is really valuable. You can both see what impact the site is having on business, you can see which marketing strategies are working and which are a big waste of money, you can improve the site. Good for you, good for your client.

Social, Sharing and Visibility Plug-ins

Simple Modal Contact Form (SMCP)

I, and my clients, use mailing list services like MailChimp and Constant Contact. While both of these offer form-building options at their sites, sometimes you just want a little more control, but again, with out having to play HTML or CSS.Very easy to use and effective, and no-one has to know you didn’t hand-code the whole thing.

The only problem I have with this plug-in is that its acronym reminds me of that song “SIMP, Squirrels In My Pants” from te cartoon Phineas and Ferb…)

WP-Polls

Thinking about offering a new product or service? Ask your customers/readers what they think. Super-easy single-question polls to pop in your sidebar. Minimalist style. Lovely.

Sexy Bookmarks

I tried gathering button graphics for all the social networking tools (Twitter, RSS, LinkedIn, Facebook) and building a sidebar “Link to me!” plea.

Then I discovered Sexy Bookmarks. You can see what this plug-in looks like at the bottom of this post (unless you’re reading the RSS feed. It didn’t show the graphics, just a huge text list, so I turned it off for you guys. Come visit the original post…)

Social Follow

Sign up at the Social Follow website, enter in your user name at all the social networking sites you use (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter etc) and they will generate a little button like the one in my sidebar, making it easy for people to follow you wherever you are (if you like that sort of thing). This plug-in builds a widget that you can drop into any widget area in your theme (again, no messing around with your theme’s code files).

WP125

You know how a lot of sites have those little square adverts off to the side? Well, some are powered by ad companies (or Google ads) but sometimes it makes sense to control your own ads.

This plug in lets you sell and manage advertising on your site. You control how big the ads are, where they go, how many show up, what images show up, and it also contains a management function, that allows you to set rates, and expiration dates. It’ll even email your advertisers when their contract is about to expire.

Nice, for getting things how want them to look

Query Post

This allows you to build sidebar widgets that contain just the posts you want them to contain. It has a zillion different ways to filter your posts and pages to allow you to control what appears. It is obviously very powerful and I’ve only figured out how to do rudimentary stuff so far, but it is simple enough for newbs and powerful enough for folks who know what they’re doing.

Category Page and Page2Cat

This is a lovely little plug in that lets you create a page that is automatically updated with all your posts from categoryX (which you define by typing a short code, i.e. a phrase in a square bracket). Simple and elegant. You may have to add some code to your site depending on your theme, but it’s only once and it is well-documented.

Make Things Easy For Your Readers

WPTouch iPhone Theme

Your three-column design might look great on a computer monitor, but it probably irritates people reading on a tiny mobile screen. Thisplug-in automatically converts your blog, when readers access it via a mobile device. It makes your site look like an iPhone app (which is cute if, like me, you love your iPhone). It also has a ‘turn this off’ button at the bottom for people who want to see the original layout, or who hate all things iPhoney. Very, very nice plug-in

Make Posting Easier For You

Flickr Manager

Every time I go to Flickr, I curse the fact that I have to click so often to get to the size and code I want for my picture. Flickr Manager Plug-in works just like the little “insert picture’ button on you WP Dashboard, except that instead of prompting you to upload a picture, it goes straight to your Flickr Photostream. It allows you to choose sizes, alignment etc and add a caption (dependent on your theme). HUGE timesaver.

(update: this doesn’t seem to be finding all my pictures since I upgraded to WordPress 2.9.1)

FDFootnote

This allows me to create footnotes ³ really simply, by using shortcodes (basically,putting something in a square bracket — in this case a number, a period and your note)

So, off you go and explore the wonderful world of plug-ins.

Update (2/22/10): Lucky 13 is:

WP-Table Reloaded

I’ve long been frustrated by having to hand-code tables in the wordpress window. No longer! This plug-in installs its control panel in the Tools section, from whence you can set up tables, add data and then embed the same table (or different ones) anywhere in your website simply by entering a short code. Love it!

Phoenix Karate – Created website architecture and look & feel, SEO and keywords, contracted graphics work, created Content Management System, created mailing list, incorporate ad space and management in sidebars, create graphics for ads and feature boxes, write news and blog updates, research and write weekly newsletter, conducted video interviews and clips to embed on site.