Whether you are brand new to blogging or have been writing articles and blog posts for years, getting ideas for content can be challenging.
Creating blog content that people will read and search engines will pick up can challenging to new bloggers, especially if you don’t have the right tools.
In this article, we will go over ways to find content ideas for your blog and decide which ideas will lead to higher success than others.
Answering Questions People Are Asking
This is the first thing to think about when coming up with content ideas for your blog. Knowing what questions people are asking can help you understand your target audience better and satisfy their need for information. As of 2021, 8% of all searches on Google are questions. While this may seem small, there are billions of searches on Google every day.
Chances are, if you are looking for an answer to a question, others may be looking for an answer to that same question. Ask yourself what the purpose of your blog is. Is it to keep your customers informed about your business achievements? Is your blog’s purpose to attract new potential customers, or is its purpose to provide information about products. Your blog’s primary purpose is to provide information no matter what you answered.
By answering questions in your blog, you can capture the audience of people asking that question. In some markets, you might be the only person answering a specific question, which can lead to a surge in website traffic if the search term has a large enough search volume.
Answering beginner’s questions about any topic can be a great way to grow your blog and reach large audiences of people by providing them with the information they will need to succeed at a task or better understand something.
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Checking Forums And Community Discussions
This ties back into answering questions. Websites like Quora and Reddit are great places to find people asking questions about any topic. There are millions of questions posted on these sites every month. While some questions go unanswered, others lead to an extensive discussion that sometimes isn’t documented outside that Reddit community or Quora page.
Turning the questions and information from public discussion boards into an article can be a significant opportunity to grow your website’s popularity within a specific niche or gain authority in a market.
Related: Turning Your FAQs Into Blog Posts
Turning To Social Media For Blog Content Ideas
Social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, can be a great place to find events to cover, gather ideas, and find questions that can be answered. Depending on the industry you are writing content for, the social media space can be crowded with a ton of information and questions being asked or small but close-knit in a non-competitive market.
Finding the right social media platform for your industry can make a big difference in the questions and quality of information being spread. It can also impact the length and value of discussions being held. A good platform for businesses to find ideas for blog articles is LinkedIn because millions of companies post every day. Simply find one of their articles and write a better version of it for your own website’s blog. This will ensure that your blog outranks theirs while also acting as a writing reference.
Related: User Generated Content In Your SEO Strategy
Another way to use social media platforms to find blog content ideas is to search through popular trending hashtags. There are plenty of tools like Hootsuite and Hubspot that allow you to monitor the growth and usage of specific hashtags. They even work across different social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram. Following these hashtags can great a great opportunity for newsjacking an article on your blog, and taking advantage of time-relevancy when writing blog articles.
Check Your Own Analytics
If you’ve been blogging for a long time or are working on a website with a preexisting blog with dozens, if not hundreds of blog posts, you will likely have some sort of analytics tracking setup on your website. The most helpful analytics tracking tools to have on your website’s blog is the Google Search Console.
You can use Google Search Console to check your website’s best-performing blog posts and take note of what was written and how on that page. When analyzing your website’s best-performing blog posts, things like visual elements, header tags, word count, keyword usage, font size, font family, and colors.
Don’t just rewrite your old blogs. Instead, use them as a backbone for writing new blogs with updated information, statistics, and opinions. This will help your blog content stay consistent with one another while also satisfying many ranking factors that made the original blog posts successful.
Related: 10 Ways Improve Your Google Search Ranking
Use Google Trends To Find Ideas
Google Trends is another SEO tool that you can use to better understand the virality of a specific search term. If you are writing for a blog that reports on recent events, Google Trends can become your best friend. This tool helps find high search volume topics and lets you compare which topics are more prevalent in search. Google Trends allows you to compare worldwide search data between different keywords and industries. This helps identify topics with the highest search volume in certain areas.
A topic may be trending in one country but might not be heard of in another country. This makes Google trends a valuable tool to use when creating blog content that is region or area-specific.
Check Your Competitor’s Blogs And Borrow Ideas
There’s nothing wrong with being inspired by the competition. Checking your competitor’s websites for article ideas can be a great way to keep the market hot and competitive. This also gives you plenty of opportunities to expand on their articles in more depth or take a different perspective.
Rewrite your competitor’s articles in your brand’s voice and tone. While doing this you can also expand on their points can be rewarding when competing in SEO. Typically longer articles will rank higher than shorter articles. A quick audit of key page metrics on your competitor’s top blogs can highlight how you can pass them.
If you are looking for more ways to find blog content ideas, check out the rest of our blog. We break down the most asked questions about blogging, SEO, and digital marketing.
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