10! Blog Ideas

Blog Suggestion # 152 - Catch Their Attention with a Numbered List

Boy have I seen a lot of these. Ten, fifteen, twenty five and more ways to cook dandelions, smoke banana peels, redecorate your one room walk-up, buy a used stolen bike, organize your ten emails on four different accounts and, of course, write a blog (understand this will lead to a following in the hundreds of thousands within one week plus fame and fortune beyond your wildest expectations) with your eyes closed  and both hands wrapped around a beer. Problem appears to be a limited number of possible suggestions and a lot of déjà vu. One of my elementary school teachers mentioned that a productive method of obtaining story ideas was to "listen to people on the bus" and use their conversations as the basis for a composition. Pretty sure another teacher repeated the idea a few years later. With a little digging through the synapses I might even come up with a name and home room, although I might just nod off instead. As an experiment I just Googled "listen to people on the bus" and was presented in .21 seconds with about 187,000 results. Yikes! Change the words even slightly and I can imagine the returned pages mushrooming into the millions. With the constant crush of information who knows anymore whose blog said what and when. Pretty positive some writers may be recycling their old posts, not that I want to tackle the messy job of sorting through my recycle bin. BTW - if a blogger reuses his old material without a rewrite, is he/she guilty of plagiarism? 

All of which really got me to thinking - pardon me whilst I check my email - okay back again, (reminder: 15 ways to ignore the email sound while typing) about a productive blog with a daily schedule, solid information, a differing setup and simple to crank out. Then a scheme coalesced in my cranium sans any help from me. Take ten truly magnificent suggestions on how to find material for your blog, write them up with genuine concern for the readers, let them sing with excitement, ring the creative bells and create confidence. Once each of the ten are trimmed and polished, allow the power of math to take over before publishing. Now remember the whole post has to be different every day to maintain attention by the masses. Recall that factorial symbol up there in the title? Okay now you have 10 possible lead items to put in the #1 position, 9 items left for the #2 position, 8 items left for the #3 position............... See where this is going? Factorial 10 calculates out to 3,628,800 discrete ways to arrange those limited 10 items. Not a whole lot different and it may transcend the spirit of the blog god, but it still can be considered different output each and every day. Divide those millions by 5 and voilà 725,760 weeks, divide by 52 and ergo approximately 14,000 years. And your estate will garner income for fourteen millenniums.

Photo by Flickr user SergeyRod used under Creative Commons