Source: www.business2community.com
Are you looking for ways to achieve success with content marketing? Do you struggle to come up with ideas for things to write about?
For many new content creators, figuring out what to write about can be quite a challenge.
There several reasons for this. First, they don’t really understand their audience and what their audience is interested in. When you don’t know your audience, or you haven’t yet chosen an audience, knowing what problems they are trying to solve can be quite a challenge.
The second reason many new content creators have trouble figuring out what to write about is because they feel that everything they create has to be completely new.
This is a myth. The reality is that there is virtually nothing new. With millions of blogs on the Internet, everything has already been covered somewhere else!
The solution to the myth is quite simple. While it may be true that everything has already been covered, the truth is that is hasn’t been covered by YOU and, more than likely, YOUR audience hasn’t yet seen it anyway.
Blogging is a very personal method of communication. Even if you are blogging on behalf of your company, YOU are still the writer that the reader is connecting with.
People don’t connect with brands, per se. People connect with people, and, in the case of blogging, it’s your opinion, your viewpoint, and your tutorials that your readers are interested in.
So, with that said, let’s dive into the many ways that you can discover what to write about.
According to Neil Patel, founder of the popular blog, KissMetrics, one of the very best ways to discover what your audience is interested in is to study the other blogs in your niche. What you are looking for are posts that have received a lot of comments and social sharing.
Whenever you find a blog post that has generated this type of engagement, you have found a topic or an idea that your audience is very interested in.
Now you know this topic is of such great interest to your audience, all you need to do is to write an article that gives your opinion on the topic as well as to add some additional value. In fact, you may even want to cite the original article in the article that you are writing. If you do, just be a sure and link back to the original article.
Another very powerful way to discover what your audience is interested in is to perform some keyword research. There are many different keyword research tools to choose from. The paid ones are generally much better than the free ones. My favorite paid keyword research tool is called SECockpit.
If you would like to use a free tool, I recommend that you use Google words keyword tool.
When doing keyword research, look for words and phrases that are searched for a few thousand times per month. The way to find these keywords is to use your keyword tool and search with either exact match or phrase match, as doing so will give you a much more accurate idea of the number of times this keyword is actually searched for in a given month. I recommend that you stay away from doing broad match searches because they will give you a highly inflated number.
Switching between exact match and phrase match is as simple as choosing a check mark in the tool when performing your search.
The other thing that you will find very helpful in the keyword tool is that when you enter your original keyword, called the seed key word, the tool will provide a long list of related keywords. When you see this list of related keywords, you will undoubtedly discover all sorts of additional ideas.
What you are looking for are keywords that are searched for enough times to make writing content that addresses them worthwhile.
For example, one of the past guests on my podcast is a guy named Marcus Sheridan. Marcus is the founder of a company by the name of River Pools and Spas. Prior to the economic meltdown in 2008, Marcus company was spending about $200,000 per year on advertising. After the economic meltdown, he could no longer afford to keep spending this much.
Instead, Marcus decided to perform keyword research so that he could compile a list of all the questions that someone would ask prior to buying a fiberglass pool. He then decided to create blog posts to answer every single one of those questions.
By continually creating highly quality, relevant content that addressed the questions potential buyers were asking, Marcus’ site became increasingly popular. As more and more content was added to the blog, Google rewarded the site by pushing it higher in the search rankings.
This is what we refer to as long tail SEO, and over time, taking this approach to content creation can create a very sustainable competitive advantage for you, just as it has for River Pools and Spas.