It is important for authors to blog as a way to promote their work, but it is easy to hit a wall with blogging. Here are some tips you can use to beat the block.

• Get an RSS feed reader and point it to sites that talk about things in your topic domain. This often provides great ideas for a blog post. With the RSS reader you avoid the site surfing – the posts comes to you.
• Interview people pertinent to your topic. I have found that people are very willing to do interviews for a blog. Send them 8-10 questions via e-mail. When they send back their responses, the post is practically written for you.
• Invite people to be guest bloggers; perhaps writing one post per month.
•  Try writing reviews of books that relate to your subject area. These are generally easier to write than other types of posts.
• Do a Links of the Day type of post. This is basically a list of 4-5 sites that you find really interesting and think your readers might, too. You can write a one sentence annotation of each link to give them an idea of what they will find when they click on it.
• Do a “5 things . . .” type of post. This is a post that has a title like “5 Things You Should Always Do when [fill in the blank].” It is just a simple bulleted list. People tend to like these becasuse they are useful and easy to read.
• Go to YouTube and add a video that highlights what you are talking about. The maxim that a picture is worth a thousand words definitely applies in blogging.
• If you blog about things that are topical or in the news, set up a Google alert based on a useful you did about that topic. Then Google will automatically rerun the search and e-mail you the results based on a frequency you specify. You can get multiple posts by continuing to update a story with the new information you get from the alerts.
• Monitor your topic or story on Twitter. You will often find new twists to a story, people you can interview or links to sites that provide great information you can incorporate into your posts.

Using a variety of blog post types also makes your blog more interesting for readers.