Having a blog is one thing; It is quite another thing to regularly provide information that will be of interest to your customers and prospects. In this article, we will not discuss the importance of having a blog for your business. Here we’re going to focus on what’s probably the hardest: how to find the right blog topic, able to attract traffic to the site because they meet the expectations of your customers…
Here are some free techniques we use to cross blocks in front of a clean sheet. Thus we find the right inspiration for our blog articles.
Where do ideas come from?
Imagination is a uniquely human quality. You can find the right blog topic by:
- reading a lot;
- persistent formation;
- according to current events;
- Based on my own experience.
These inspirations will form the bridge between the different ideas leading up to the “Eureka moment”.
In the creative process of writing blog posts, imagination by itself is not enough. There should be a more strategic and tactical side to it. There are many ways to find the right article topic. Here are some ideas where to look:
Listen to prospects and customers
The Internet is a perpetual whisper! He never stops talking to you and gives you opportunities, you just have to listen and learn to listen.
chatbot
If you’ve set up direct messaging or chatbots, you’ll need to be on the lookout for recurring questions from your customers and prospects.
These will allow you to have the material for long term production.
Put a Q&A tab on the site
It might be interesting to put a Q&A section on your site. That way, people with edgy questions can ask them and thus feed a list of topics to your editorial calendar.
listen to salespeople
Every day, salespeople receive a large number of questions from customers and prospects regarding your services or products. So have the courage to listen to them and gather all kinds of information that comes directly from your potential targets. It brings together valid and appropriate ideas to use as topics to cover in your articles.
interview your customers
Before you start writing, it’s essential to know the reading and information habits of your buyer personas. Do you know exactly what type of media they consult, on what topics and for what reasons?
If you have an answer to this question, great! Otherwise our advice is to ask them directly. There are several ways to do this:
- during an annual meeting;
- Thank you for a questionnaire set up in your company;
- By publishing a funny post on a social network or by posting it live.
The possibilities are limitless! It’s up to you to be creative!
You also have to be empathetic and listen to the customer when they ask you about some of the problems they face in their daily life.
Also ask yourself what their questions are, their frustrations, what their questions are. Then try to find the article idea that can answer these questions.
Google Analytics
In your Google Analytics account, you can see the most read and most successful topics in a given period of time.
That way, you can revisit and revisit these topics or choose to create content under the same topic but through a different angle.
See what your competitors are doing
It might be interesting to see what your competitors are doing. You should specifically look at:
- topics they discuss on their blogs and social networks;
- most popular topics. Pay attention to the number of comments, likes, shares or any type of conversation that shows interest from their customers/prospects.
These actions will give you an idea of ​​what works best with a single business goal. The important thing is to look for success trends without actually copying them. Be warned, plagiarism is influenced by your consumers as much as by search engine algorithms.
tell success stories
In your business, you have certainly encountered a customer problem that is more difficult to solve. You’ve probably spent hours thinking about his questions, his goals, and strategies for succeeding!
Describing this whole process through a post on your blog can help other potential customers to solve their problems or give a real life example that the difficulty they are facing is yours in the past, The cause of your product or your service is resolved.
google search console
To see the performance of your keywords, you need to go to the Google Search Console tool and the “Performance” tab.
In this you will find all the keywords of your website that get the most impressions and/or clicks from the search engines.
These metrics give you an overview of the keywords that drive the most SEO traffic to your website. Therefore it is a potential guide for your next topics.
google keyword planner
The Google Keyword Planner tool is integrated into Google AdWords. It allows you to plan your keywords for ad campaigns, but also gives an overview of the keywords’ performance.
It is an important source of inspiration for finding related questions on web searches. This tool gives you monthly searches for your keywords, traffic forecast and the competition rate of the keywords.
Analyze Quora and Reddit
Quora and Reddit are question-and-answer flows organized by different universes.
We don’t think about it enough, but they are great marketing tools that shouldn’t be overlooked these days. They allow you to access questions directly related to your business.
That’s why you should spend some time on these community networks to find out what are the most frequently asked and most relevant questions related to your business.
Use Google’s Algorithms to Your Advantage
When you type a query, Google has three different ways to help you with your search:
auto suggestion
When you type a query like my example “how to write an article,” Google suggests several different topics.
This part will help you understand whether the topic you are trying to cover is frequently searched on Google or not.
most asked questions
This part is very interesting to see the type of query users typed for a search like yours.
related research
This part deals with searches related to your query. It’s Google’s algorithm that lists them based on their relevance to your initial search. This can give you ideas for your next article or refine your core topic.
Google Trends
It is interesting to see the dynamics of the development of a topic on Google Trends. This tool will give you an indication of the research done on a given topic and its development over time.
Let’s take a concrete example, when you look for trends related to “article topic” and compare them to “article title”, you can see that the dynamics are not the same.
The second word is the most searched on Google and is constantly evolving. This lets you see if the title of your article is relevant.
This feature is especially interesting for businesses that have a fixed season. This allows them to see when a certain word is searched for. Thus you can organize yourself in advance to be able to give your answer at the most appropriate time to your target.
answer the public
Responding to an audience is a real tool all marketers should be aware of. It allows you to see trends on a major topic and frequently asked questions about this topic.
However, it remains a tool in the service of strategy. You need to take every suggestion carefully and analyze whether it is really interesting for your business or not.
group brainstorming
It’s also good to use collective intelligence to come up with good ideas for the topics and titles of your articles.
So you can organize a fun meeting with your team regularly for this purpose.
Other Paid Blog Topic Research Tools
- Semrush: Get fresh ideas from Google Collections;
- Ubersuggest: Organizes correlated searches alphabetically;
- Yooda Insight: Tools for researching relevant keywords;
- 1.fr – is a tool for optimizing and researching the topics of articles on various topics.
Bonus: Create an Editorial Plan
As you may have noticed, there are a lot of techniques and tools for finding blog topics. However, to be successful, you may not lack strategy.
What is really most important is the consistency and consistency with which you post on your blog.
Having a well-executed and operational editorial program will keep you rigorous and aligned with your objectives and your potential goal.