Blogging generates the most buzz in the Digital marketing space. While everyone can blog, it is vital to creating a blog that creates value for your audience.
The first common question that occurs in the minds of any blogger is “What topic should I choose to write about?”
Your topic is your first touch point with your audience. It is necessary you choose a topic that has a strong connect with your target group and is trending among them currently. This increases your chances of being more viral and generate more organic reach.
Here is how I used these 16 techniques to arrive at 20+ blog topics when I wanted to find a topic to write on Social media marketing.
1. Delve into Quora
If there is any place you want to be to hear your audience’s voice, it is Quora. Quora is a forum where users ask questions looking for solutions. Here is how you can leverage Quora
Search in for a related keyword and look out for the top recommendations.
Go through the search results to find a conversation that you can write about. These are topics which your target group is already interested to listen about.
I was looking for a topic to write on Social media marketing and I found this chain interesting. Free Social media marketing tools. I can tweak this to address my niche group if intended such as “Free Social media marketing tools for Solo Bloggers”
If this is not serving the cause, open a familiar question and look for the Related Queries on the right side. This will further open up your options for your Blog topic.
You can easily find content to start with by going through the answers under the questions. This will give you a head start with your content for the blog and add perspectives to the content.
2. Using Buzzsumo to find content with maximum shares
Buzzsumo is an online tool that helps you find trending topics from the internet. It has both paid and free versions, while the free version is devoid of most features. You can create a 7-day free trial with this to explore all features available within the tool.
Content Analyzer
You can use the content analyzer where you type in your keyword and Buzzsumo lists you the top articles based on the number of Social shares. You can customize this search result with various parameters such as time, region, language etc. listed to the left side of the tab. See if you can leverage one of the topics for your next blog.
Trend Analyzer
The trend analyzer gives you a live feed of trending articles from the social platforms. You can create a personalized feed for you based on your keyword and add specific domains to monitor their feeds.
I created a personalized feed for Social media marketing to find what is trending currently on the Internet with respect to Social media marketing. Since it was a Thursday, I could find a lot of celebrity Throwback Thursday posts trending. Maybe I can draft a blog on “how brands can use throwback Thursday for their Social media campaigns”.
3. The right Facebook group
If you want to directly listen to your audience’s requests and the common issues they face in your sect, Facebook’s groups are another place you have to be. Find the right facebook group and look for threads with your relevant keywords.
I found this thread which is interesting and quick to start with. I can easily pen down “20 blogs to follow for beginners in Social media marketing” The comments have given me some areas to begin my search with.
4. Content Aggregator Websites
Content aggregator websites give you the latest content from various websites for a specific keyword. You can create a custom feed on these websites and have your daily dosage of content relevant to your field.
Feedly
Feedly is a content aggregator website that gives you the latest topics from leading websites. You can create your own personalized feed based on keywords and view the top articles from the top blogs and websites for your keywords. One more area to get new topics from.
Alltop
Alltop is another content aggregator website that brings you the leading articles and blogs from industry leading websites. Use the search tool to find the blogs related to your search term and try to improvise form the search results.
This seems a rather interesting read for my target audience. I can modify this for into 25 places to get free stock images for your Social media posts.
5. Comments on Blogs and Articles
A good blog drives curiosity and makes people think. It is natural for good thinkers to have questions popped into their mind. To find these innovative questions you just have to go to the comments section of these blogs.
Search the internet blogs for your keyword. By this time you would’ve already known the market leaders for your domain so try them out first. Go through the comments in the blogs and look for an interesting question posted by a user and seeking a reply. Like the one, I found here
Looking for Social media marketing, this guy has posted a question on Facebook’s layout changes. I have a topic with me now “Recent changes in Social media platforms and how brands can adapt themselves to it”. Pretty cool right?!
Listen to your Sales and Support team
If you are a part of an organization, your sales and support team are your primary data sources. They interact with customers on a regular basis and have a better understanding of the customer’s pulse than anyone else.
Talk to them to find about the common queries they get from customers and request raised in common by the customers. Try to generate a blog topic based on that.
One of the common queries we fetch is when people try out Paid advertising and find cumbersome results out of it. They reach out to our team to know where they went wrong and how can we help them.
This paves way for a content topic on “Common mistakes people do in Social media advertising”
6. Google as your advisor
Charity begins at home and sometimes, the idea for your next blog topic and also start from the famous homepage. Here are two ways you can use google to find your next blog topic
Autocomplete
Google autocomplete throws some good suggestions during most of the times. Start typing in your keyword with some common words such as How, What, ways to etc. and look for the autocomplete options. These results are based on both your previous search history and trending searches on the internet. See if you are lucky to pick one out for you.
This is what I got when I tried. Instead of going generic, Google has suggested me to go for a specific target segment such as Business, restaurants, employees, parents, law firms etc. Sounds a fair one. How about “9 Social media tips to land on your next dream job”
Related Searches
This is an area where most people miss out. Scroll to the bottom of search results and you can find some topics waiting for you in the form of related searches.
I choose Social media for job seekers and this was my related searches. Now, I can create one more blog from the related searches. “10 mistakes people do while using Social media for Job search”
7. Webinars and Speaker sessions from events
This is a rather easy and effective way to find your next topic. All you have to do is just search for “webinars on <keyword>” and look for webinars from leading Industry sources.
Browse through the list of webinar topics until it sprouts an idea for you. You can even register for the same to gather perspectives on the topic before you start writing on it.
This is what I found! “How Social media has evolved from a networking platform to a marketing platform”. Now that is a story to read.
Events and conferences are other great places to find thoughts from Industry experts. Look for conferences happening under your domain and navigate to their speaker sessions or agenda to find the various topics being discussed in those events.
I ran into three topics from one of the conferences I found. I can now choose what to write on and as a bonus, I have got a synopsis from the speaker.
8. FAQs
FAQs are the results of deep Social and customer listenings. They are the usual questions which the customer is bound to ask when they read through the specific content.
Find FAQs from related websites and competitor websites for your topic and try to build your next best blog on top of it.
I can relate to a minimum of 5 topics from this FAQ I found for Social media marketing.
- How many times should you post in a day on your Social handles
- The best content that works on Facebook and Instagram
- Social media strategy for Lead generation – Paid and Organic
9. Social mentions
Social mention website aggregates User generated content from Social media platforms to one single channel. You can type in your keyword and find the latest blogs, images, videos based on your keyword.
Social mention also aids you with Sentimental analysis, top keywords listed in the content which you can leverage in your blog topic.
On top of all, this tool is free!
10. Pocket
Pocket is a tool that works on both desktop and mobile to save interesting reads and dig into them later on. Pocket also has a feed from web generated content for the users to sink into.
Hit the explore tab and type in your keyword to find topics trending among users in their clippings. This is one more channel to find that is trending among your target segment.
11. Long tail keyword planners
Keyword planners are ideally used in the second phase of your blog journey where to try to find keywords with high search volumes to optimize into your blog.
But, you can use long tail keywords to derive your blog topic out of them. Long tail keyword recommendations are based on user search volumes and having your topic based on them will work well since they directly match to your audience’s search queries.
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is a popular tool for long tail keyword planning. Type in your keyword and click on related keywords to find matching keywords and their search volumes. Higher search volumes will have high competition. In addition to this, you also get the SERP analysis where you find the website that has leading traffic via those keywords.
Here, I can either choose to go for a how to post and compete with the large brands or I can write on top Social media marketing jobs and how can you prepare for it to have a niche segment.
Soolve
Soolve is another long tail keyword planner which provides the trending searches form various platforms such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Amazon, Yahoo and Bing in addition to Google.
Soolve offers you a one stop solutions to monitor the trending searches in various platforms reducing your time and efforts.
12. Online Chat Forums
Reddit is a popular chat forum where experts to beginners collaborate to share knowledge and help each other. There are many online chat communities such as Reddit.
Find the leading communities for your domain and go through the threads to find interesting Q&As and build a topic around it.
This also enables you to create your first backlink in a high DA site post publishing.
I searched Reddit for Social media marketing and I found this thread with more active engagement. I can go through the channel and write my blog on “The best free Social media courses available online”
13. Research competitors traffic
Your competition is also working hard and you can utilize their efforts. The content Industry is huge and demands creativity and this can come from anyone.
Using tools like Alexa, SEMrush, you can find the top traffic attracting pages for your competitors. Find the blogs that are having the maximum reach and brin gin the maximum share of traffic for you competitors and try molding them to one for yourself.
Using SEMrush, I could get the top 10 results for free. Here I find that soravjain.com is fetching its maximum share of traffic from the blog Top 22 Digital Marketing Institutes in Bangalore. You can further click the result to understand more on the keyword used and the top backlink domains for the blog.
Use this to write one on your own such as Top XX Digital Marketing Institutes in Hyderabad or so.
14. Rewrite your top post in a different tone
Now that you have analyzed your competitor, dive into your own Google Analytics tool and look for the blog that has earned you maximum visitors in the past. This can be your meal ticket for next blog.
Tweak the top performing blog to a different tone and publish the same.
For example, if you find the blog “Top 17 tips that works charm on Facebook” has earned the maximum share of traffic in the past, try rewriting it to “Top 20 mistakes you should avoid on Facebook”.
Your visitors have had a flavor of your content. Reaching them again with a similar flavor will ease the possibility of engaging with your blog.
15. Medium
Medium is another content aggregator site. Instead of aggregating content from other websites, Medium encourages their users to share their articles in their own platform. The best part here is Medium is used by many individual Industry leaders thus, it serves as the best place to find their natural thoughts and opinions.
Use the search option to enter the keyword of your choice related to your domain. Click the top stories option to view the top stories related to your keyword and you can gain inspiration for your next blog right there.
Here is a top story from Buffer on a case from Instagram story. Users always like to hear proven case studies. Roll through your past records and pen your next business case study. You can also use medium to serve as a backlink to your next blog.
16.Subscribe to email lists of industry leaders
This is an easy way to have topics delivered to your doorstep every day. Simply subscribe to the top leader website in your domain and they never fail to send you their daily dosage of content.
These topics are prepared after intensive research and they cater to your same target segment. Go through them and see if you can utilize any of them to rewrite for your own blog. In some cases, you can even combine one or two for your blog.
Example, if you get an email with 5 tips for Facebook marketing and 5 tips for Instagram marketing you can improvise it as “15 tips for your Facebook, Instagram and Twitter campaigns”.
These pro tips are widely used by users around the world and are time tested practices. We started this blog with an example to find the topic to write about on Social media marketing. After these 16 steps we have finally arrived at the following 17 topics
- Free Social media marketing tools for Solo Bloggers
- how brands can use throwback Thursday for their Social media campaigns
- 20 blogs to follow for beginners in Social media marketing
- 25 places to get free stock images for your Social media posts
- Recent changes in Social media platforms and how brands can adapt themselves to it
- Common mistakes people do in Social media advertising
- 9 Social media tips to land on your next dream job
- 10 mistakes people do while using Social media for Job search
- How Social media has evolved from a networking platform to a marketing platform
- How many times should you post in a day on your Social handles
- The best content that works on Facebook and Instagram
- Social media strategy for Lead generation – Paid and Organic
- Social media marketing jobs and how can you prepare for it
- The best free Social media courses available online
- Top XX Digital Marketing Institutes in Hyderabad
- Top 20 mistakes you should avoid on Facebook
- 15 tips for your Facebook, Instagram and Twitter campaigns
So what are you waiting for, use these 16 tips to start void and end up with loads of innovative topics for your next content.
Do you have a better way to solve the cause? I am listening! Drop your thoughts in the comments below.
