It's no secret that good writers work the same way as everyone else: 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. They spend very little time thinking of what they're going to write about and yet spend a whole lot of time doing the actual writing. This is normal. What isn't normal is the reverse, spending too much time thinking about what to write and not actually writing.

Passionate Writing

People are inspired to write about all manners of things, but the passion of what they're writing about shows through (or the lack of it). What am I talking about when I'm talking about passionate writing?

Passionate writing involves writing about the things YOU love and the things YOU hate, as opposed to what everyone else loves or hates. Too many writers, offline and on, tend to write about what they think the readers want to read. Once you have a reader base, this may actually work but until then, you're wasting a whole lot of time. When you write about the things that you're passionate about, there are going to be people who share your interests and your passion. This is where your reader base is going to come from.

What you should NOT write about.

I write from experience so I'm not just making things up to convince you to stay away from things I think will do you no good. Before I can tell you exactly what you should write about, I have to tell you what should not write about.

• Your Metrics or Statistics: Frankly, no one cares about the numbers related to your website, blog or whatever except for you and your advertisers. Your searching readers aren't searching for it and your regular readers, your reader base, couldn't care less.
• Reviews: Unless your particular venue (wherever you publish) is designed for reviews, you will be doing nothing for yourself and everything for someone else. Unless you're getting paid to do it, of course, but that doesn't have a whole lot to do with writing in the first place.
• Sponsored Posts: If you write on a blog, avoid sponsored posts like the plague. It doesn't matter if you're providing links without the "nofollow" attribute or not. The companies that associate with the sponsored post services have already been identified, along with the services, and it's an automatic red flag — this is the reason that those types of posts are slowly disappearing from this blog. The sponsored post services do not care about you or your websites and naturally only care about the money they can make from you, even if it's only a temporary situation.
• Controversy: There's nothing wrong with being controversial by accident. It's doing it intentionally that can drive you crazy. If you must write about religion, politics, racism or anything else which polarizes large groups of people, you should do it on sites designed for that very purpose.
• Blogging about Blogging or Writing about Writing: What I'm doing right now is a no-no. I'm writing about writing. I'm doing it for a specific reason, however, and that reason will only be apparent to a small group of people and that's all I will say about it.

I only scratched the surface and I apologize. Think about the things that people aren't looking for when they visit you and I'm sure you can add to that list. Of course, everything that's on that list has a place and can do really well in those places. They're not something that an average writer should be targeting, and that's my point.

What you should write about.

This is a lot easier than you may think. Look at your environment – where you live, where you work and where you hang out. Unless you're unhappy with them, these are great sources of material.

Look around you. What do you see? Everything within sight or hearing has the potential of being your next source of inspiration.

One of the things that I enjoy, that I'm just barely getting into writing about, is the things we use everyday without thinking about it. In particular, I like to delve into the history of these things. As consumers, we take so many things for granted that I sometimes don't know where to start or stop.

If you're old, like I am (middle-aged), you have your own history you can relate to things that the younger generation can't understand without your help. A few slightly humorous phrases come to mind: Life before Star Wars, life before Nintendo and life before television remotes. They're just examples, but you should be able to see where I'm coming from.

If you open your mind to the possibilities, you can write about almost anything and draw the readers in. When you write about what interests you, you also write about what interests others. It's that simple. Now, combine it with methods to make money online, and you have a whole new career ahead of you.

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