If you’re a content writer, you have a blog or work for a company, you might have struggled with this question before: How do I find good blog topic ideas? There might have been situations when you didn’t have any ideas and you had to write something just to keep your users engaged.
For everyone that has stumbled on this, I understand you. I know what you’re feeling. And you’re not alone. For somebody who writes on a daily basis, you need to be like a factory of fantastic ideas and give valuable information to the audience, because they need it. They are looking for guidance in every possible way.
Most of you have to become factory ideas overnight, but there are solutions for you during the day. That’s why we thought about the following effortless ways and platforms to find topic ideas:
Look for Q&As on Quora
Use BrandMentions to Spy Your Competitors for Content Ideas
Get Inspired Using Pinterest
Uncover Trends and Identify Influencers on BuzzSumo
Check Google News for Current Events
Follow Influencers’ Articles on LinkedIn
Get Ideas from Discussions in Facebook Groups and Reddit Communities
See What Other People Are Sharing on Zest
Finding the right content topic is essential, but the way you write it is also important. Good content writers will always be in demand, just like Joel Klettke points out.
“We don’t need to hire a writer. We’ve got formulas and a template!” pic.twitter.com/HREhKHCimw
— Joel K (@JoelKlettke) September 18, 2018
1. Look for Q&As on Quora
Quora is an abundance of information and continuous resource for content writers, users, noobies and people wanting to find specific answers to their problems. The information is organized and edited by users, which makes it easy to understand the user behavior.
Besides all the ideas, you get the advantage of seeing what language and vocabulary people use, the way of writing and asking questions. And after you got some inspiration, you can write the article. Then you can answer questions by pointing people to your article.
Quora is a great space for keyword research and headings/titles inspiration. For example, if we use the screenshot below and we want to write about keyword cannibalization, we can see if most people use a focus keyword such as – avoid keyword cannibalization or the question type such as – what is keyword cannibalization.
The site is divided into topics, which makes it easy to search for ideas and get insights on what people are looking for. There is an entire community on Quora where a lot of people and experts on every subject you can imagine are actively contributing with knowledge.
If you are focused on a specific topic, use the newly launched Spaces and follow the community that interests you.
Besides all the ideas we’ve talked about, there are other things Quora is good at. Only by using a few clicks you can:
find what people are looking for. Search for general keywords on Quora and see questions regarding your topic.
get updates on trending topics right on the homepage.
read sourced research from experts and get their permission to quote them in your new article.
find every influencer that you can contact for outreach.
2. Use BrandMentions to Spy Your Competitors for Content Ideas
Wouldn’t it be a shame to miss an opportunity to talk about something that has great traction and create a massive, evergreen blog post that will get a good social media score and links 3 years after you’ve written it?
We’ve previously talked about the advantages of using a social monitoring tool, such as BrandMentions, that gives insights based on what finds online. You can spy on your competitors to see what are they writing, what type of content gets more engagement. And based on the response they get from the audience, you can see the topics of interest and try to create a better piece of content than theirs.
You can monitor fresh topical content related to your business and create better content in your niche. You just have to search for a topic and the tool will show you the results.
Whenever your brand is being brought up on the web, a marketing opportunity is rising and that applies to your competitors as well. If you know what people are talking about them and find their strengths and weaknesses, you’ll know what to offer to the audience and steal them from your competition.
Using a social monitoring tool such as BrandMentions helps you manage the mentions and go right on the spot by offering live support. You can find what people are saying about a specific brand and not necessarily to it, because there might be lots of untracked brand mentions, without any direct link to the brand.
For example, people might talk on social media but not place the @ before the name of the brand. And we must remember that it’s not only influencers in your industry who mention brands on the web, but there are also lots of other people that are consumers.
3. Get Inspired Using Pinterest
Another free way to find content marketing ideas is using Pinterest. The motto of the platform describes it very well: Discover recipes, style home ideas, inspiration and other ideas to try. So inspiration is at its place on Pinterest.
If you’ve never used Pinterest until now, then you did miss on lots of great opportunities. The social media content you get here, might not be found on the other social channels. You can use Pinterest to:
get free ideas for blog posts.
create content that your audience actually wants.
find keywords you should use in your blog post to help with SEO on Pinterest.
The process is very simple and very intuitive for beginners. You just have to search for a keyword, such as blog:
Then look in the search suggestions box for other keywords that are used for searches and get topic ideas and headings that intrigue the user. Look at the most popular keyword suggestions, such as marketing (blog marketing), for beginners (blog for beginners), ideas (blog ideas), tips (blog tips) and so on.
That means there are a lot of new bloggers looking to learn about blogging or bloggers that are in the marketing field and search for ideas and so on.
Getting those recommended keywords means that those are what your audience is searching for. Use those keywords into your titles tags and description.
If you decide to use Pinterest, then those keywords should be into your pin description and heading to boost your Pinterest “SEO rankings”. So that when people are searching for those keywords, your post gets a higher chance of being on the top. That’s how easy it is to get creative content marketing ideas using Pinterest.
4. Uncover Trends and Identify Influencers on BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo can help you generate new content ideas and see what the audience craves. You can search for popular topics and see results based on total engagement, evergreen score, number of links and other more. You have lots of filters available to go into a deeper analysis and get more accurate results based on your needs.
For example, we searched for video marketing and we wanted to see the pages with the highest engagement.
Another great thing about this tool is that you can get some ideas of keywords based on the results you get. If we look at the search we’ve made for video marketing, we can see that video and SEO, or video marketing tips, or video marketing statistics are valid recommendations we could use in our content.
5. Check Google News for Current Events
Google News can fit very well in your content strategy to see what is trending in digital marketing and other industries. It is the easiest way to look for current events and news in your industry. An interesting news piece relevant to your query can be used to write a quick, creative and even controversial content.
You can search for anything regarding digital marketing or business, technology, entertainment, science, sports and many more. Or search for things you might be interested in, based on what you find in other categories and get directions from there.
If you want awareness and have a relevant audience then finding a news hook for your pieces could be the solution. You have the possibility to select the language and the country and get more personalized results, which afterward can be saved in your account.
6. Follow Influencers’ Articles on LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a professional social media platform that you could use to connect with experts and people that write valuable information. You can comment and create connections and, most important of all, you can get inspired by what they are writing and talking about on LinkedIn.
You can find the posts they make and the questions they ask by scrolling on the homepage:
You can go deeper and look at their published articles. LinkedIn Pulse is the platform owned by LinkedIn where influencers write their articles.
If you get an idea and write about it, then you can contact the influencer and let them now that you quoted them in one of your articles and they can check the blog post once its published. After that, you can ask them for a share or you can share their post by tagging them.
It will create a snowball effect and you can get more people to share your content afterward and get new contacts that you can ask for their ideas in your next piece of contact. For example, you can create a blog post asking a single question to industry influencers where you could quote their answer. And then repeat the sharing process to build a strong online presence. It works very well as a growth hacking technique, too.
LinkedIn is a great source of inspiration. And it makes it easy to get exposure for yourself and your business if you decide to share your articles there.
7. Get Ideas from Discussions in Facebook Groups and Reddit Communities
Social media marketing is a powerful way for businesses of all sizes to reach prospects and customers and get new content ideas. Facebook Groups is an underrated asset. It a strong base for an active community. You can see new trending topic discussion, recommendations, tips, new insights from business owners and specialists.
You can use communities in case you have any doubts about a specific topic. Let’s say, for example, that you heard lots of times that multiple links coming from one and the same domain are considered to have lower value, so unique linking domains are typically a more reliable metric than link count. And you’d like to know if anybody experienced a situation when this statement isn’t true and get some examples that you could use in your article (of course, after asking for permission).
Or you can ask for tips on client retention and see what comments and answer you get and use them in creating a new piece of article. The combinations are endless. You just need to be on the right community, where people comment and are active.
There are lots of content types that work differently on every social platform, so make sure you get ideas and adapt the message to the type of audience you target.
8. See What Other People Are Sharing on Zest
I usually use Zest for finding new blog post ideas. Right after you enter the page, you’ll see each article in a box format which includes the title, the cover attached and a short description.
The friendly design works very well to skim through the content and makes it very easy to share and save it in your account for future inspiration.
There are other ways than scrolling to search for content on Zest. You can apply specific tags and get the articles that are related.
Other options for filtering results are by the type of content (audio, video), shares, clicks or latest posts.
There are lots of experts that share their articles here. You can follow people and get instant notifications. It is very easy to use and easy to share content, as well. This comes in hand if you want to amplify your content and give it a boost after publishing.
If you haven’t used it before, you should definitely start now because it is a gold mine.
Don’t miss all the Zest from the content marketing juice. Your content needs all the zest and personality you can get.
Conclusion
As a farewell message and recommendation after all these tips, I shall leave you with one that can complement the other ideas and it could help you be a better content creator. Grow the skill of becoming content savvy, which means developing the ability to see valuable content everywhere. The content creation process can be hard, but there are lots of ways to make it easier.
Whether you’re in the bus/metro/car and see a commercial ad, or somebody reading an interesting book (look at the title), reading posts on social media, listening to the radio or podcasts, watching a video/movie, reading something online or skimming through the news, you must see content inspiration everywhere. This way you’ll never run out of blog post ideas again.
The post 8 Free Ways to Find Blog Content Ideas That Convert appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.
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