Investing in content is generally a great idea. But, do you know the difference between good, great and awfully bad content? Without this, your investments are going to be futile.
A good content piece always derives from great content ideas. If the idea itself is bad, need I say more about the content that comes on it's back?
This post is all about generating all the ideas you need.
1. Ask your audience
Before going guns blazing into keyword research tools, the first point of contact should be your customers. After all, you're writing to them. As said before, common sense dictates that you approach your readers on what to write about.
How to ask your audience?
If your website has some traffic already, add a popup form filled with one or two questions around your content. This form should pop up as people scroll down your content.
Or you could conduct a poll on groups you're part of.
You could simply ask “What are the problems you're facing now professionally?”.
Here's an example:
There are several ways to conduct polls. I find groups and brand-owned Facebook pages or Instagram pages to be the second-best place to do this other than my site.
You could also discover content ideas through forums.
Search in places that already have your audiences bustling with traffic. Niche relevant forums are one place. Q&A sites like Quora are another good source.
Gather data to find relevant bits and pieces of useful information around topics your core audience seems most interested in.
2. Browse for content ideas
There are other ways as well.
Go through content that's already present online. Given a subject, there might be 100s of sites covering the said topic. Browsing for ideas doesn't require you to leaf through books in a big library to find inspiration. You can do your research from the comfort of your own home. Find what your audience is interested in by going through the following:
- Go through iTunes podcasts
- Go through reviews of books in your core niche
- View popular niche relevant videos on YouTube
- Look at presentations on Slideshare
- Research more topic ideas on Quora and on sites like Answerthepublic.
With books, videos and other content, you get proven ideas you can use to create content around on. You could read reviews and comments to get a deeper idea of the topics that videos and books cover.
3. Use tools for content ideas
It's only now we're going to talk about tools. As said before, talking to your audience is the best possible way to get insights on what to write. When that's exhausted, you can use tools to achieve the same thing.
Quora
Quora started out as a tiny question and answer platform. It's gigantic today. Quora sports hundreds of thousands of questions on all manner of topics and ideas.
Here are questions around keyword research on Quora. In addition to finding inspiration, you could also answer these questions to generate some great traffic.
Just have a few keywords at hand and start researching them on Quora to find relevant discussion threads. You will get deep insights into the kind of content that's popular now and how to create content that helps people.
Answer The Public
It's another customer insight tool where you can enter a keyword and the tool returns several relevant questions around the subject.
The tool also pulls up suggested search snippets from Google and compiles them all together into a search cloud.
The questions look something like this:
The tool organizes questions into categories and gives a demographic overview of people searching for these questions.
You find out what your audience is asking and in what context. It doesn't matter if you're creating content for a b2b blog, an eCommerce site or a hobby blog. You can use Answerthepublic to find relevant things to talk about.
Organize what you glean into an excel or a sheets file and run those questions by Ahrefs to get even more phrases and ideas you can use.
With tools like Answerthepublic and Quora, you have a ready list of FAQ content you may want to use.
Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is a great tool to identify trends around questions and phrases and what's popular. When you research a keyword, the tool lists out social share counts for each and every post it finds.
It also finds out who shared the content. That means you can reach out to these influencers for quotes and more opportunities.
You also get to see the number of backlinks the post got, giving you ideas on who to reach out to, to get more links.
With Buzzsumo, discovering trending content on any subject is just a few taps away.
4. Find out popular topics and create satellite content based on them
I guess you already have some sort of tracking enabled for your website traffic. If not, why not?
When you want to publish new content you don't have to look for inspiration far.
Your analytics is a proven resource of ideas that you know your audience likes.
Check your site's analytics. If you're using Google Analytics, here's what you can do to get a better idea of what's working.
Go to behavior>>site content>>all pages. Here decide the date range you want to apply. You could go back a day, a week, a month, a year or more.
Source: http://kamayobloggers.com/content-marketing-tactics-guide/
Once you're happy with the selection - scroll down to see blog posts by the number of page views. The list before you shows the most popular content on your blog for a selected date range. You can also see their bounce rate.
In addition, to get an idea of what's popular on your site, you could also go through social media analytics.
Case in point - on your Facebook page go to Page insights>> followed by posts and scroll through the posts to determine reach and engagement. Similarly, you can find top performing content on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles.
What to do next?
Spend time analyzing top content. Based on the topics they cover - do additional keyword research and discover more ideas you can write about.
Also, find if your popular posts share a common theme or topic.
Discover if the content from one source is more popular than content from other sources.
- Does a particular format perform better?
- Does a certain content length speak better to your audience?
Based on the insights you glean you should be ready to churn out more content that's bound to succeed.
It's not just the pages that get the most traffic. It's also pages that generate the highest time on page.
When on your analytics, it's easy to get blindsided by numbers by focusing only on pages that get the highest traffic. Pages that generate great engagement too are important. The problem is - you may have great content but also sport a high bounce rate.
The reason? Pages that load slowly. That was the case with me. Once I fixed that, I was able to easily see which of my posts were performing well by focusing on the twin parameters of pages that get the highest traffic and also those that get the highest engagement. That should form the foundation of your content strategy.
5. Follow trends
Go to Google trends and discover even more ideas of popular and trending content around your core keywords.
This is called brainstorming.
When was the last time you brainstormed a list of content marketing ideas for your blog?
You just write whatever you feel like writing.
However, going through trends and search suggestions is a powerful method of coming up with interesting ideas and topics for your site.
List-making helps you branch out to related and relevant topics and this can be particularly helpful when you want to come up with a bunch of ideas you can use in your content.
Another thing to do is go to the bottom of a Google search page to see the keywords that appear under related searches. These are phrases that others searching for the phrase that you now keyed in too are asking about.
These topics are great to write about because they are semantically relevant to your core ideas.
6. Store your ideas somewhere
When you have gone through all the steps mentioned in this guide, I can assure you that you will have more ideas than you can use.
That's a problem. Because you can't use all of these ideas at one go.
That doesn't mean they're not worth it and you should dump them. List out all the ideas that came to you as a result of this research and keep them in a Google drive or sheets file.
Keep all your ideas organized. If you don't like doing it online you can use a scrapbook to store all the ideas.
There are plenty of tools that let you copy snippets from Google search.
8. Get inspired by competitors
If you're just getting started with content marketing, you have absolutely no idea about the kind of content that would work best. Or if content marketing will work at all?
To be safe there's a proven way. Go through the content your competitors have written.
You may not know it yet, but the odds are high there are loads of competitors in your space. And looking around can get you more ideas than you can handle. Try and understand who's creating terrific content. Narrow down to people who are getting results with their content.
You may already know the names of influencers in your space. Look at the topics they're writing about. And then leverage their most shared articles to create your own content campaigns.
Use tools like SEMrush to do deep competitor research and analysis on top-performing content from your competitors. The basic premise is - great content doesn't need you to reinvent the wheel. Blog posts aren't the only content formats to use. You can also repurpose the content, syndicate content to different platforms, say by converting the blog post to an infographic for social media and more.
Conclusion
How do you usually come up with ideas for content? Which of the proposed tactics from this list of 8 ideas do you like most?