There are tons of things you can write about - but have you ever asked yourself, "What’s really relevant to my readers?", "How do I make sure that I don’t run out of ideas?"
In this post, I'll highlight two crucial things - the importance of content, and some strategies for gathering ideas for the best possible content.
Why is content so important?
Content marketing is perhaps the most used inbound marketing term last year. And for good reason. Content is the cornerstone of any good website looking to serve their customers as best as they can.
People need content. People want content.
And so follows the search engines.
Content for search
Content accounts for searchability in various ways. First and foremost, it allows you to be searchable for your target keywords by simply placing those keywords in the best spots in the body of your content - the title, the heading and the first paragraph.
Secondly, the more content you have, the more your website’s index increases. Search engines prefer to have a strong body of content to index than a website that has only a handful (unless it's a handful of highly relevant, authoritative pages).
Content for user experience
You may not know it, but content plays a huge role in user experience. It is basically the voice of your website. When people are trying to look for something in your site - whether it’s a functionality, a page or a contact form, your content is responsible in leading them there.
Imagine a website that is full of functionality - no blog, no knowledge base, no user on-boarding process whatsoever. It’s not a pretty sight is it?
People get lost easily on a website that lacks content. As a result, they bounce off - most of them never to come back.
Content for authority
As far as I’ve gone in my journey as an online marketer, I have found no better way for a person to increase his authority online than for building awesome content. It’s how Brian Clark built his through Copyblogger, it’s how Rand Fishkin got there through Moz, it’s how I built mine through SEO Hacker.
Before writing for the SEO Hacker blog, I was typically a nobody. No one knew my blog, no one knew about me, no one really gave a damn.
And that’s alright. But as time went on and my site’s content kept increasing, people started to notice. They started to comment, share and link. Best of all, they saw me as an authority in the SEO industry - including me in round-ups, interviews, case studies, and so on and so forth.
Convinced about the importance of content?
Let’s move on to getting you started on your content’s ideas.
3 strategies for gathering ideas for awesome content
1) The Skyscraper Technique
This technique is super simple, really. It's basically going through the best performing and linked to content out there - and then rewriting it and promoting it like crazy.
Let’s face it: Pretty much everything under the sun is on the internet. There’s nothing really new that’s not been written about, shot on video, or made into an info graph.
So why kill yourself in brainstorming what your next best article would be when it’s already there?
Check out this case study by Brian Dean on how he increased his search traffic by 110% in 14 days.
This will save you a lot of time, a lot of testing and a lot of research.
2) Ask your readers
Chances are, your readers already have a particular preference when it comes to the types of content they want to read. The sad thing is, they won’t really tell you unless they are highly engaged, long-time readers.
The good news is, there’s a simple, powerful way of asking your readers this powerful piece of information that can direct your content efforts.
3) Run a survey.
Not just any survey - run an on-page survey. Studies show that an on-page survey gets 700% more responses and is highly relevant because it is presented right inside your website.
Disclaimer: I am a co-founder of Qeryz :)
A free on-page tool you can use is Qeryz. The best thing about it is that it has a Wordpress plugin ready to be installed right on your site's back-end.
Here's a case study:
Actlikeaman.org is a blogsite for Christian men. The blog topics range from a huge variety - from fatherhood, manhood, purity, leadership, finance, relationships, etc.
We wanted to know which of the topics resonate most with our audience who are age 21-25. So we ran an on-page survey.
First, we wanted to know the age groups of our audience:
Turns out that the segment we were targeting is the third largest age group of our readers.
Next, we proceeded to ask the question of which topic they were interested in. It turns out that the overwhelming majority was tuning in mostly for the relationship blogs. So the blogger created a series on relationships - boosting the traffic, subscriptions and social shares of the blog as a whole.
3) Target Perpetually Searched for Keywords
One of the best strategies out there in creating content is targeting keywords with already high demand. I've done this over and over again with the SEO Hacker blog.
Going after keywords in high demand means tons of perpetual traffic. Here are some pages from my Google Analytics data that's brought me significant traffic last year:
Put it simply, the keywords that are bringing visitors to those pages are:
- Youtube SEO
- How does 301 and 302 redirect affect SEO - or any combination of this
- How asynchronous / deferred javascript affects SEO - or any combination of this
How did I know which keywords to target?
I used Keyword research tools such as Wordtracker (of course), Keyword.io, and Übersuggest.
Did these keywords convert? You bet!
We got clients wanting to hire our SEO services to optimize their Youtube videos - even if we already outlined in the blog entry how to do it step-by-step.
Frankly speaking, if you want to save time and make your investment in your piece of content worth it, I would go with Wordtracker since it's pretty much the only keyword tool out there that gives you a rough estimate of how much traffic a target keyword brings in - plus it gives you more alternatives to your target keyword.
That's it!
Three very simple but actionable strategies on how you could get past the content idea roadblock. Try it out and tell me how it works out for you in the comments section below!
