If there’s one common issue that people in the blogosphere constantly struggle with, it has to be coming up with fresh and hot topics for their content. That’s not exactly breaking news, right? If you’re a blogger, then you have surely been down this road at some point.
A steady stream of fresh and trendy content on your website or blog goes hand-in-hand with great SEO and strong site traffic, so it’s important that you deal with your writer’s block and dig up new content opportunities for your blog as quickly as possible. In this post, we intend to share with you some professional content writers–approved tips on how you can successfully handle those few situations when you just can’t seem to find anything relevant and new to work with. We hope these tips will help you create content that reaches the peak of the ongoing conversation and drive more traffic to your website or blog in no time.
First and foremost, we want you to be your own source for uncovering current and interesting topics for your blog. So, take the time to focus and regardless of your niche, allow yourself an opportunity to jot down different ideas. Of course, you won’t magically come up with a million-dollar idea, but in the wake of a few honest attempts, you’ll more than likely find material that you can work with. It goes without saying that you don’t have to draw on every idea – just the good ones. This simple method always leads to tangible results.
Trust us, this simple little idea can prove to be golden! Here’s how you can do it: Take the ideas that you’ve generated from your brainstorming sessions and plug them into a notepad file in numerical order. Every now and then, when you come up with a fresh idea, make sure to add it to the file. You can keep a file on your smartphone too, so when you’re out and about and if you think of some good topic to blog about, you can quickly jot it down. Later on, you can simply add your phone list to your main list. That’s it. Simple, yet effective!
But, what if you’re finding it really, really hard to come up with an interesting idea on your own? Well, here are four things you can do to quickly land up at topics that might make great blog posts for you.
Google is at the forefront of everything that has to do with Internet marketing and that holds true for when you need to stay ahead of your content creation and always have things to blog about as well. Connected directly into Google’s search engine, Google Trends tracks analytics on what people are actively searching for. Whenever a certain keyword phrase sees a huge increase in the volume of searches in a very short period of time, it’s said to be trending within Google Trends. Being based on actual search patterns, these keyword searches are highly relevant to your targeted audience. And because the searches are trending within Google Trends, you know there’s proven interest. What we’re trying to say here is, leveraging Google Trends is an excellent way to identify keyword phrases that could be the root of your next blog.
Termed by some industry experts as one of the best link building tools, Ahrefs Content Explorer is next on our list of ways to find inspiration to generate a steady stream of fresh content that’s relevant to your business and your audience. The mechanism of Ahrefs is pretty straightforward – all you need to do is enter a search term (any word or phrase) and filter the search results (web pages relevant to your search query) by the criteria important to you (domain rating, referring domains, organic traffic, traffic value or social media shares.) This way, you can discover some of the most relevant, engaging and marketable topic ideas for your custom content writing as quickly as possible.
Along with using professional tools like Google Trends and Ahrefs Content Explorer, you may want to do some competition analysis as well. Read up on what your competitors are talking about. Try to find topics that are receiving tons of comments and feedback. Do you notice any trending theme that most of your competitors are following and you’re not? If your key competitors are doing well because of their up-to-date content topics, it’s a good idea to taste some of that sweet recipe for success, don’t you think? We’re not saying that you turn to the detestable spin-off tactics, but you can certainly take inspiration from their ‘hot-selling’ topics that you might have never thought of.
Last but not least, creating a survey to directly address real customers and real concerns can be one of the most straightforward ways to get stirring ideas to keep your content latest and sharp. After all, the survey answers can help you identify what problems your target audience has and what kind of solutions they’re looking for. Once you’ve picked something to address, you can get to writing! To create your survey, you can use a professional online survey development cloud-based software program such as Survey Monkey. Survey Monkey provides current responses from your target market, so you can rest assured that you’ll discover some hot and interesting topic ideas.
And there you go. These are some really easy, yet effective ways to get your creative juices flowing. Before you know it, you’ll have enough content to post for a full year based on these tips alone. You may even find yourself with more content ideas to post than you have time. Now, wouldn’t that be something?
