You have a deadline of a blog post coming soon, but you still do not know what to write about. Choosing a content topic is a crucial step in order to ensure that the topic is not only relevant to your audiences, but they also remain engaged and keep coming back for more. After all, if you choose a topic that your audiences isn’t interested in they probably aren’t going to read your content at all.
You might be an experienced blogger, developed keyword research, and already tried techniques to get through the writer’s blog, and
Well! It is easy to get lost in such a vast amount of information. Sometimes the hardest part is that in spite of knowing where to find your data and resources, it becomes difficult to make it actionable. And this is exactly what you need – a simple and actionable process that is easily applicable, scalable and recognizable in the content marketing industry.
From today onwards stop worrying about ‘I don’t know what to write about’? Hopefully, my blog post will help you to generate new ideas, refine your topic and identify which topics are worth pursuing further. So, here you go…
Know the goals and sub-goals of the post
Do you want to generate leads? Or spread an infographic that is important to your company? Or want to get as much traffic as possible? Let’s say your goal is to drive maximum traffic. So your responsibility should be to figure out:_
- How you’ve successfully driven traffic to the blog in the past?
- Which topics are
SEO friendly? - Now get more specific about that topic and suggest a working title.
It is equally important to find out the sub-goals or criteria that your topic must have in order to meet your goals. Say for instance, if one of your sub-goals is that the chosen blog topic can’t give you much money to learn or write about, you’ll obviously not choose a topic like ‘reviews of timeshares in South America’ which might be an expensive topic to start with. However, you do not have to worry about the cost once you’re a well-established blogger.
Choose a topic you like to discuss/debate with others
There should be a smooth conversation between you and your audience. If your audience find your topic of discussion relevant and meaningful, they will always leave comments on your blog, email you to discuss your posts and ask you questions for further clarification. So be prepared to be responsive and receptive to them.
You may also choose a topic that you don’t mind debating with others. The blogosphere is made up with people from all walks of life with varying opinions. And you may find some of them may not agree with everything you write. However, you must enjoy discussing your blog’s topic from all angles and initiate a healthy debate.
Your blog’s long term success depends on how well your topic is accepted by the readers and the sense of social community you can create around it.
Researching is an important aspect of your topic
Change is the only constant factor in the content marketing world. The unique aspects of blogs is their ability to provide meaningful, fresh content and therefore a discussion forum for a wide variety of topics. To bring out a successful topic, you need to thoroughly enjoy knowing the blog you are writing for and researching for further data. In-depth research will help you keep up with the current trends, news and events related to the topic you’ve chosen and thereby enabling you to keep your content interesting and relevant to the readers.
Let me share a trick with you – when you focus on gathering the most important data that’s relevant to your goal, you can identify a few more attractive blog post ideas from those resources for your next blog post.
First and foremost, you must strengthen your social media platforms for great content marketing strategy. Besides your own content and that of your competitors, you can easily identify which type of content topic is mostly liked and shared in your social communities. Social communities have different groups that are connected to each other and form your audiences.
For instance, from Twitter, you get to know your communities and influencers, the topic of discussion they prefer and can even obtain the most popular tweets from your influencers. Now create a list with the top content shared in your influencer’s tweet and segregate it using different topic areas identified for your communities. Now complete it with search-popularity and social related data for each of them by
- Title
- URL
- Linking domains
- External links
- Number of shares in social networks
Once you have identified the posts topics and pieces that have performed better in social networks, you can prioritize the overall best performing content for your topics
Ask questions to validate blog post topic opportunities
Asking the following questions can help you prioritize the idea of your content
- Is the topic related to your business goal and vision?
- Is this the type of content that is interesting and useful for your audience?
- Will you be able to write the post that can be easily consumed and understood by the readers?
- Are you sure how your content idea will help your audience solve an issue or improve what they have?
- Are the resources needed to write the post achievable for you?
- Will it be profitable to rank with your post?
The winning idea will be those for which you answer YES to all these above questions. Moreover, in case you identify a topic that has already been covered in the past with a blog post, but it complies with the rest of the previous criteria and is appealing to pursue, then you must think about how you can create an unique selling proposition that can differentiate your content idea from what came before.
Determine the longevity of the topic
Check whether the topic can hold interest for months or years. Will the post you write today still be valuable tomorrow, next month, or the coming years? If you can find answers to these questions then you have found a niche to explore and are sure to have a decent numbers of readers for a prolonged period of time. Longevity of the topic of content depends on how well you have researched for the topic and incorporate relevant information.
Consider the five Ws
The five Ws- who, what, when, where and why and ‘how’ for the potential topics are important to consider, as they help you to target your audience’s needs and emotions and choose a topic accordingly. Now you have to classify each idea with a level of interest based on how relevant it will be for your audiences and the amount of search volume that exists around each topic.
As you now know the topic of your blog post, it’s time to make a quick structure of your post. The reason for creating a structure, before you write your blog post is because it is a lot easier to establish a great post when you make the structure of what you’ll be covering in your content. Moreover, the length of your blog post is also an important factor when it comes to search ranking and popularity of your post. All these factors are key to creating good content.
Images: ”Word Blog with colourful letters. 3D concept on white background. / Shutterstock.com“
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