If you are a writer or blogger you have probably struggled at some point to come up with ideas for topics to write about. At some point you may have had the lofty goal of writing an article every single day, maybe even multiple articles every day. Even if you prefer to only write one or two articles a week you've probably experienced the frustration of being stuck for ideas, for this experience is almost ubiquitous amongst writers. This can hit exceptionally hard for those of us that strive for a high volume of output (while hopefully maintaining a high standard). Fortunately there seems to be a very effective way to keep your pen moving or your word processor humming. All it requires is a subtle shift in our objective.

For those of us wanting to make money from our writing, logic dictates that the more we write, the more potential we have for earnings. Or the more potential we have to build our reputations and portfolios. Whatever our objective is, it is likely that we will meet it more quickly by writing a lot than a little. Unfortunately this leads to placing a lot of psychological pressure on ourselves to "perform," which is detrimental to the creative process, and we may very well end up suffering from writer's block. We can circumvent this by changing our objective from that of "what can I produce?" to "what have I learned?"

This approach immediately makes all of our experiences potential topics to write about. The things that we have learned are things that undoubtedly have potential value to a reader, if we are able to convey the lesson. If we focus on our own learning, our writing can be a synthesis of the knowledge we have gained. I think this is what most of us tried to do with our writing anyway, but now we are making it our foremost goal, instead of something that we happen to do along the way.

Also, teaching is a powerful learning tool in and of itself. If we take what we have learned and can pass that along to the reader, we have solidified that knowledge in our minds and truly made it our own. This will create a sort of snowball effect, the more we learn the more things we will have to say as we can juxtapose and combine different pieces of knowledge.

So the next time you are struggling for an article idea think to yourself not "what can I write?" but "what would I like to learn?" By answering this question you will often find that the writing takes care of itself.