Feeding yourself to keep ideas fresh

Feature Fest is your 6-day crash course to train your team (or future team) and finally glow up your site.

Maintaining any blog at all is hard work. Our blog is only an extension of our company, for instance. Not a full time job. And yet I spend inordinate amounts of time thinking about what topics might interest our readers and worrying that I might run out of ideas and have to start repeating the same old thing.

You, on the other hand, are a full-time blogger. You have my sympathy. While some people may hear you say you’re a blogger and picture days of sitting around the house in pjs binge-watching the last season of The Good Wife, I know that you’ve got just as much stress at your job as anyone else. Maybe more.

After all, in most jobs, you come into work, and someone tells you exactly what to do. You don’t have to self-start.

As a blogger, however, you’ve got to constantly crank out new, original ideas and stick to a rigorous writing schedule whether you’re in the mood or not. As a food blogger, you’ve got to try out daring recipes, experiment, fail, explore, and try again.

Sometimes, because you do recognize that you’re just a wee bit charmed to be profiting from something you love, you may feel a little guilty about taking time to relax and re-energize. But you shouldn’t. The work you do takes creative energy, and creative energy cannot be used constantly without depleting your supply.

You’ve got to find ways to add to your supply of creativity so that your blog posts remain fresh and exciting to readers, and that means taking care of you.

Take yourself out to lunch

Not to a fast food joint either. Take yourself to a restaurant you’ve never tried. Something exotic and surprising. Order a few courses. (Don’t worry. You can write it off as a business expense.) Savor the experience and make notes about the flavors, the textures, the scents.

If you can get away once a week, do it. Try a different place every time until you’ve sampled the fare of every restaurant within 50 miles. The experience of diverse ingredients prepared in unusual ways and served in beautiful style will inspire you to integrate more experimentation into your food blog.

Read regularly

Read as a writer. It’s a different approach than you’d take reading strictly for pleasure or information. When you read as a writer, you’re paying attention to the way other writers express themselves. Because writing about food requires rich sensory descriptions, it’s especially helpful to sample lots of food writers.

Try The World on a Plate: 40 Cuisines, 100 Recipes, and the Stories Behind Them by Mina Holland or Nigella Lawson’s delicious How to Eat for a meatier read. Visit other food bloggers’ sites and indulge in gourmet magazines for quicker reads.

Challenge yourself

It’s easy to get stuck in a rut, especially in the kitchen. Especially when you’re busy. To break out of routines that may be stifling your creativity, challenge yourself to break out of your comfort zone. Visit your local market and pick up fresh ingredients that you might not otherwise try. Try recipes from other cultures. Make small changes to familiar recipes and see how those turn out.

You might even collaborate with other food or lifestyle bloggers in formalized challenges or participate in food blogger challenges issued by products like Tabasco. In both cases, you’d have the additional benefit of cross-promotion.

The most important thing to remember when you’re running out of new ideas is that they’re all around you. You’ve just got to get out there and make them your own.