You're sitting on the beach, drinking one of those concoctions in a coconut shell where the little umbrella keeps trying to poke out your eye. A real looker (in a swim suit that's barely there) walks by and you pretend not to stare. The sun is giving your skin a golden glow and you decide to stay in that spot forever.

With a start you come awake and are transported back to reality. A quick look at the snow piling up outside and you decide the dream is going to come true...

...but to help get that done you need to write an article today and the writing muse just isn't flitting around the way she should. Is it hopeless?

Nope. Because there are people out there -- a lot of people -- who need to know the information you have in your head. All you have to do is write it down for them to read. But which information do you write down?

Just answer their questions!

Head for the nearest forum that caters to your niche, whether it's car repair, sewing quilts, or training dogs. In every forum there are a mix of newbies and experienced people and in the more active forums, more newbies are showing up every day.

Hang around the forum long enough and you're going to start seeing the same questions pop up time and again. And even though the experienced people are sick of them, the newbies in the crowd want to know the answer. That's your ticket to fame and fortune (or, at least your ticket to knowing what to write about).

To get your article topics, instead of reading the current messages, go back a few months and start scanning the titles of the messages. Watch for topics that crop up over and over again and start creating a list. If you go back 6 months and scan forward, by the time you get to "now" you're probably going to have a list with at least a dozen questions that keep coming up.

The questions got answered on the forum, sure, but you're going to write an article with more detail, a new perspective, or some other value added. After the article is written, put it on your blog as a page or on your web site as a stand-alone article.

Now when you are in the forum and the newest member asks one of those "not again!" questions, pipe up and give them at least part of the answer, and then give them a link to the article you wrote to get all the details.

By answering the questions people are asking you'll be able to write articles almost automatically -- they ask, you answer!