How To Find Blog Content Ideas That Increase Engagement
Writer’s block is a creative person’s enemy. You know what you want to say but don’t have the words. What’s worse than writer’s block, especially in content marketing, is a topic block. How do you give your team guidance and direction when you think you’re asking them to write the same thing over and over? Content ideation doesn’t have to be this way. If you worry about how to find blog content regularly, you’re not alone. But there are ways to get around it and bust out of the block. We’re covering some options today with topics like:
How To Find Content For Your Blog
Here are some tips to help you find the right content for your team’s next blog post or content series:
1. Review Your Most Popular Content
Which pieces of your content are already getting attention online? Which ones are your audience returning to and sharing through other channels? Every topic that you cover for a blog post has several interesting angles to explore. Take the topic “search intent” for example. This is more than just a one-time keyword. This term can serve as a starting point for forming more long-tail keywords that fit under the main topic.
So when you look at the most popular content on your website, decide what topics those pieces fit into. Then look at what other keywords you can cover under the same topic. This process allows you to create both pillar and vertical content to give your audience as much information on that topic as possible.
2. Look at the Questions
According to Moz, search engines exist to “discover, understand, and organize content” so searches include only the most relevant results for the user. You can use search engines to find out what users are asking so you can answer these questions as you create content. When you dig through topical questions, you’ll often find a lot of long-tail keywords that can provide tons of blog content ideas.
So how do you know what the right questions are to answer with your blog posts? A few approaches can help, like the autofill suggestions in the search bar and the “People also ask” results on Google. Suggested searches and related queries also provide insights into the questions your audience is asking, giving you even more ideas to work with when creating quality blog content.
Other places to grab content ideas include social media comments, customer reviews, and FAQ forums like Quora. Platforms like these often prove valuable to find topic questions you can answer in your blog content.
3. Browse Alternative Media Content
Your blog ideas don’t have to come solely from other written content, either. Podcasts, videos, and documentaries are excellent resources for building on relevant topics. You might even review and optimize some of the media from your company’s past content. Take CopyPress, for example. We created an infographic detailing the history of infographics then used it to create written content.
So before pouring through endless searches for new content ideas, take a look through older media assets. You just might find something you can use for curating high-quality and engaging blog content.
4. Perform Competitor Research
Analyzing your competitor’s content provides insights into the topics and keyword terms you should cover in yours. Understanding which topics are trending and reaching target markets is essential for creating content your audience wants to see. Your analysis also ensures that anywhere your competitors’ content appears, yours does, too.
But you don’t want to just copy competitor content word-for-word. First off, that’s plagiarism and not only is it morally wrong, but it can also be a legal mess. You also don’t want to cover the same topics over again. It’s not enough just to appear in the same searches or on the same feeds as your competitors. Offer something more. Find out how your competitors are covering updates, current trends, and relevant information. Then do it better.
CopyPress has a way to help you with your competitor research through our content analysis report. This document shows how your content compares to that of your top three competitors. It also gives you a list of content gaps. These are areas your competitors cover, but you don’t. Yet. These gap topics give you a basis for additional research into the top terms and topics your audience is looking for.
“CopyPress gives us the ability to work with more dealership groups. We are able to provide unique and fresh content for an ever growing customer base. We know that when we need an influx of content to keep our clients ahead of the game in the automotive landscape, CopyPress can handle these requests with ease.”
Kevin Doory
Director of SEO at Auto Revo
5. Follow Google Trends and Alerts
Google has plenty of tools that make sourcing information on the right topics. With real-time updates and alerts on trending topics and current events, you’ll have even more ways to gather insights and ideas for creating quality blog content.
Google Trends was originally designed for journalists, but it’s helpful for any kind of content creation. According to the company, “Google Trends provides access to a largely unfiltered sample of actual search requests made to Google.” In short, Google is giving you access to raw data about what people are actually typing into the search bar. You’ll also find Google Alerts a valuable tool for delivering current, relevant content topics straight to your inbox.
Related: 3 Tools To Use for Content Creation Ideas
6. Use a Generation Tool
AI content generation can’t replace writing with human emotion, but it can help you pick the next great topic for your blog content. One helpful tool is the HubSpot blog generator tool, which can help get you started with topic ideas, title suggestions, and relevant keywords and phrases.
The Blog Idea Generator powered by Topic works similarly but provides you with a list of alternative keyword examples related to the one you shared. It also gives you a sample opening paragraph with the option to generate a full content brief for a fee.
7. Post an Interview
Who said your team has to do all the talking? Interview someone else for a change. Is there an opportunity to let your audience’s voices speak for themselves in your blog content? What about interviewing someone from another department in your organization to get their take on an industry topic?
Letting someone else’s voice speak can bring a unique perspective to your brand and your content. It can help make your content multi-dimensional and interesting. Interview pieces take on their own format, making them fast-paced and easy to read, which will intrigue your audience and keep them engaged.
8. Ask for Guest Posts
Similar to interview content, guest posts showcase other voices and perspectives on your blog. When choosing who to approach for a guest post, consider someone with experience and knowledge of your industry. This individual also shouldn’t be affiliated with your competitors.
Guest posting often works as a two-way street and allows both participants to get some SEO credibility from the encounter. So expect to help guest bloggers build backlinks to their blogs or provide similar guest posts in return.
Related: Guest Posting: How It Works and What It Can Do For You
9. Work With the Professionals
The challenge of finding relevant topics for blog content can also lead to problems when you want to scale production. Working with an agency or team of content professionals can save you the time, money, and hassle of performing content analysis, collaborating with creative teams, and planning blog content. With CopyPress, you can push all the facets of blog development into expert hands.
Our blog writing services include strategy development and topic research to discover the topics your audience wants to see. Then, our team of qualified writers follows your brand style and delivers quality content that increases audience engagement and drives traffic.
With our process, you’ll free up valuable time that your team can dedicate to other priorities. CopyPress can also help you scale your production to keep up with demand as your business grows.
What to Do After Finding Blog Content Ideas
Once you have your blog content ideas, you need a strategy to apply them. As you collect content ideas, create an assignment process for writers and editors to ensure consistency across different topics. Then you can evaluate how this blog content supports your overall content goals. After publishing each blog post, track it. Look for KPIs like organic traffic, bounce rates, and click-through rates. Metrics like these can show you how well your content performs and how likely your audience is to engage with it.
Related: 8 Simple Ways To Make Your Blog More Appealing
Work with CopyPress to Develop Your Blog Content
No matter your industry, CopyPress understands what you need to get people reading, talking about, and sharing your blog content. With SEO as the focus of everything we do, we don’t just want to help you come up with unique blog topic ideas. We want to send them straight to the top of the SERPs to get the most organic traffic to your site. Schedule a free strategy call with our team, and we’ll help you get started.
CopyPress writer
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