How To Keep An Ideas Journal So You Can Make Money Online Writing Articles!

You’ve heard it over and over by now: You can make money online, writing articles! How’s that working out for you? Are you sitting there asking yourself the same question again, trying to figure out what to write about? Are you beating yourself up again because you know the money’s out there, you just have to write some stuff and you can have it, but you can’t figure out WHAT to write?

Running up against a writer’s block is a very common occurrence for most writers at most any level. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t all have a common term for it! But you don’t have to suffer from that when it comes to ideas for writing articles to make money online. After today, you should not have to worry about that again.

If you will follow this simple plan, you won’t waste any more time trying to figure out what to write about. Instead, you will spend more time writing articles so you can make money online!

There are three simple steps to keeping an ideas journal:

1. Become observant and thoughtful
2. Develop the habit of carrying your journal everywhere
3. Refer to your ideas journal every time you sit down to write.

These three simple steps are not necessarily easy, but they are simple. Learn them, commit to them, and then live by them!

It’s a very good chance that most, if not all, of your writing ideas so far have come from being observant and thoughtful. Let’s break that down. Observant is easy enough, it means looking around at the world that surrounds you every day. What do you see? When you look around right now, you might see your children playing nearby, or your cat or dog sleeping next to you, or you might notice a plant on your window sill or outside. Look some more and what else is there to see? You see the different toys or games that your children play with, the chew toy for your dog, or your cats favorite feather, you might see some flies on your houseplant, or flowers on the plants outside.

The more you practice ‘looking’ at things, the more observant you will become. You will no longer see ‘a dog’, but you will start to see medium sized, long haired, brown and white, youngish looking dogs instead. You won’t see ‘a plant’ you will start to see a slender vine that clings as it climbs, with woody stems and oval leaves, 5 to a stem, and dark blue flowers, and so on. Becoming observant is not difficult, but it takes practice. The good news is that becoming observant is free, and you can practice anywhere and everywhere!

Becoming thoughtful might take a little more effort, but then, it may just come as the natural next step to becoming observant. The more you look at things and see more about them, the more you will be inclined to think about them. You see the vine climbing the fence outside and you wonder: How high will it grow? How does it hold on? Will it flower? How long will it live? Can I grow more of them from the seed? What is eating it? And it goes on and on. If you like, call it being curious. The idea is that you are observing things more clearly and in more detail, and then you are thinking about them in more detail. Here’s the clincher… if YOU are asking these questions, and wondering these things… OTHER PEOPLE ARE TOO!

Now it’s time to address the logistics. All these thoughts that are coming to you now when you observe things, they are the thoughts that become ideas and topics to write about. The things that you are seeing and wondering about are the same things that other people ALL OVER THE WORLD are wondering about every day. And they are searching for the answers online. So you need to capture, or document, these thoughts as you have them, so you can use them later. Believe me, once this starts working for you, you are going to start having so many ideas that you can’t possibly remember them until you get to your desk, so write them down.

So get yourself some type of paper and pencil or pen that you can carry everywhere, easily. You have to be able to carry it easily or you will get lazy at some point and stop carrying it. Personally, I use a little ‘memo notebook’ that measure 3 inches by 5 inches, spiral bound on one edge or the top. It fits in my back pocket and it’s small enough that it doesn’t bother me being there. I always keep a pen in my pocket, so I am all set. You may want something fancier, and if that is what gets you to carry if everywhere, then go for it. If you carry a bag or a purse, you might opt for something larger, like the size of a day-planner or so on. I don’t honestly recommend you do this in your day-planner, if you carry one, because I think it would be too easy to open it up and get distracted by other things going on in there.

No matter what you choose, start carrying it everywhere, and get used to whipping it out every time you get an idea. As you become more observant, and start thinking more about what you are observing, you shouldn’t be surprised or alarmed at how many ideas you come up with. Later, you will filter through all those ideas, and some of them may never interest you enough to pursue writing an article about. The rest will provide a valuable treasure trove of ideas that will help you make money online writing articles.

Now that you’ve got this great new tool working for you, don’t leave the job half done! When you sit down to write, get out your ideas journal and start reviewing your ideas. If it helps, you might even start an ideas development notebook at your desk, where you can use a larger format to work through your ideas and flesh them out with keywords, references and so on.

But always maintain the portable ideas journal that will go everywhere with you. You know it’s really starting to work when you are sitting in a public bathroom and pull it out of your pocket to capture an observation about the tile work in municipal restrooms! That is what is so powerful about the ideas journal. Even if you only ever get as far as writing about 25% of the ideas you capture, you will always have lots of ideas to work with and to choose from. This is one of the first steps when you go from wanting to make money online, writing articles, to actually working toward you goal and getting your first payout.

I have been using an ideas journal for years, long before I came to HubPages, and it has helped me over and over again. Are you ready? Do you want to make money online writing articles? Click here to check out HubPages and see how it works.

Thanks for reading. I welcome your feedback in the comments, and I hope you will share this article with your friends.