You’re sitting down at your PC or laptop.  You’ve finally caught up with the day’s tasks to the point that you actually have a chance to take a second or 10 to lean back and catch your breath for a bit.  But, around the 4th or 5th second, your mind inherently starts to scour the database for activities to stay productive and BOOM!!! It occurs to you that this would be an excellent time to write a new post for your blog – you know, the one that has been collecting e-dust since it was last updated seven weeks ago.

So you fire up your blogging account, impressed with yourself that you were able to guess your own password on the first attempt.  You click the ‘Add New Post’ link on the dashboard and a moment later a fresh canvas awaits – a blank white box and a blinking cursor just waiting to be filled with your wit and expertise.

You begin to rack your brain for a quick nugget of knowledge that you can share with your readers.  Five minutes go by – but no internal inspiration spills onto the page.

You start looking around the room, seeking a topic of interest to magically ascend from the cylinder of ink pens on your desk, or perhaps an interesting tidbit may leap gracefully from the pockets of your laptop bag and onto the screen.  But alas, there is no inspiration to be found from the random objects in your office.

So you start to read some of your old blog posts.  While this is often a great antidote to blogger’s block, this time it fails you.

Frustration begins to set in.  You begin scouring your bookmarks and sites in your RSS reader in order to find something – anything that might make for a halfway decent article.  At this point, discussing the pros and cons of the fold vs. wad technique is beginning to look like a viable topic of conversation.

Finally, after 45 minutes in front of your screen and only a working title and a sentence or two to show for it, you finally give up and move on to more pressing tasks, leaving the tumbleweeds to continue to occupy the online space that houses your blog.

Does any of that sound familiar to you?

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be that way.  There are easy ways to get past the usual blocks that typify the frustrations a blogger can frequently encounter.  A few simple mindset adjustments will greatly enhance the blogging experience for both you and your readers.

Blog topics are everywhere.  No matter what niche you happen to write for, there are always dozens of things to write about.  Here are five tips for avoiding the traps of blogger’s block:

1) Tap into your expertise. Identify common problems within your niche that people are looking to solve.  If you’ve answered a question about your topic in the past, expand on that in a blog post.

2) Practice ‘mind-mapping’. This is a technique used by many people that can be very helpful in identifying stuff to write about.

3) Stumble Upon. If you don’t have SU, sign up for an account and download the toolbar.  Not only is it highly entertaining, but it can also expose you to a lot of awesome information you’d otherwise have missed.  Set your preferences to items pertaining to your topic, and stumble your way to a million article ideas.

4) Change your mindset. The time that you’re sitting in front of your PC is NOT the only time you’re blogging.  Think of blogging as a 24/7 activity.  99% of the time that you’re hit with an idea for a great blog post, you won’t be sitting in front of your computer ready to bang it out.  You’ll be in a restaurant, or in Home Depot, or watching a movie, or having a conversation with a colleague.  Be prepared to copy the idea down before it escapes your melon and floats aimlessly toward the ionosphere.  If you’ve got a cell phone that was manufactured after 1999, it will have a note-taking or voice-recording feature which you should utilize to save ideas for a rainy day.  Like a great photographer, be ready to capture that moment that an awesome idea comes to you.

5) When you get the chance, start a new post with a few quick notes about the topic and save it as a draft. This is especially helpful when ideas are plentiful.  Then, when you’re short on stuff to say, you can go back to your stable of unfinished blog posts and go to town!

How about it?  What did I miss?  What’s your best method for defeating blogger’s block?

“Whether you believe you can or you can’t, you’re right.” -Henry Ford

In many ways the world is naturally segregated, both socially and ethnically.  And within each divide, there is a perceived class that everyone fits into in one capacity or another.  One of the sad byproducts of this phenomenon is the fact that it generally congregates all of the successful people into one class and leaves everyone else on the outside looking in, only to hopelessly ponder the seemingly uncrackable code of how to get a slice of the pie known as ‘The Good Life’ for themselves.

And, while this paradigm of society has held true since the beginning of civilized man, the imaginary barriers between the Haves and the Have-Nots is eroding at an mind-blowing rate.  And the fact is, as Gary Vaynerchuk once stated matter-of-factly, there’s plenty of room at the top.

The separation of the successful from the semi-successful and unsuccessful people is not an accident.  It is human nature for like-minded individuals to gravitate to one another.  There isn’t a concocted plan to squeeze out the little people – the reason successful people wind up in the same circles is simple: they purge negative influences and toxic people from their lives.

Think of it this way: Have you ever bounced an idea off of someone and had them give you a dozen reasons as to why it won’t work?  Who was this person?  Was this someone who’s achieved great things for themselves?  Probably not.  Chances are pretty good that this person was a failure at many things themselves.  And, if there’s one thing an unsuccessful person loathes, it’s the success of other people – because it serves as a reminder to them of what a loser they are (whether this is actually true or not is irrelevant).

If you have people like this in your life, you need to let them go.  They are holding you back.  Everyone who you allow into your circles must wish you nothing but the greatest success.  It doesn’t matter what they’ve achieved in their own lives.  Considerations for the way that people will react when you succeed is a symptom of the fear of success.  You have to proceed knowing that you need to leave those negative people behind.

The greatest myth is the fallacy that the upper echelon of high-achieving people are deliberately trying to wall the lower class people out.  Not only is this almost universally untrue, many of these perceived ‘successful people’ will actually be more than willing to help you achieve your dreams, and happy to do so*.

The wall between you and the success you want to achieve isn’t made out of 1″ bulletproof glass; nor is it made out of reinforced concrete.  And, there’s no barbed wire at the top and there are no angry man-eating Rottweilers on the other side, either.  The wall is in your head.  And the sooner you realize that the only thing holding you back from achieving the things you want to accomplish and living the lifestyle that success has to offer is you, you’ll see that the walls you’ve imagined into existence can be torn down as easily as they were built up in the first place.

*A nice resource for interviews with successful individuals from a variety of business mediums is David Siteman Garland’s site: The Rise to the Top.