Welcome to the lesson #4.
In this lesson I'm going to solve the common struggle of finding great content ideas for your blog.
So that you will never have to worry about it again.
So here's the agenda for this lesson:
I have four sources of great content ideas for you.
These four will be enough to fill your content calendar for a full year ahread, I promise.
And then we'll talk about prioritising your list of content ideas, and decide which of
them will have the highest impact on your business.
So let's go.
Part 1: How to discover great content ideas by studying your niche
Regardless of the niche that your business falls into,
be it business consulting, health care,
insurance, photography or anything else.
The chances are a ton of people are talking about it online.
There might be forums or different online communities, where your ideal customers are hanging out
There might also be groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit or Slack.
And there might be some sites where people leave their Reviews about relevant products or services.
In other words, there's no shortage of places online, where you can go and watch your target
audience communicate and speak their mind.
Even Reddit alone can supply you with enough content ideas to keep you busy for months.
There's a subreddit for almost anything.
You're in business of selling knives?
No problem, let's search for "knives" on Reddit.
And I see two cool subreddits right away:
r/knives/ and r/knifeclub/.
It took me just a few minutes of browsing these subreddits to find a few great ideas
for blog posts:
But let's not forget what we learned in lesson #3:
We need to make sure that people are actually searching for these topics in Google,
estimate the total search traffic potential, see if there's a parent topic that we could target,
and finally look at the number of linking websites among the top-ranking pages.
So let's put these three topic ideas from Reddit into Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer for a quick research.
And immediately one of them seems promising.
I see an article at knifeinformer.com titled "The Best Gentleman's Pocket Knife" and it
gets almost 400 visits per month in the US while only having one link from one website.
And the rest of the search results don't seem very competitive based on how many backlinks they have.
How cool is that?
It took me just a few minutes to find an awesome article idea, that has quite decent traffic potential
and a tiny amount of links.
Guess how many content ideas you will find if you browse Reddit for like two hours?
And Reddit is just one of the wide variety of places around the web where you can go
and study what your target audience is talking about.
In fact, amazing content ideas can come from almost any source that is somehow related
to your business!
This one time I was browsing the book store in the airport, while waiting for my flight..
And saw a magazine, which had a title too good to ignore it:
"How to setup online business"
So I immediately bought it.
Not because I was hoping to learn anything new from it, but because this was the magazine
that my target audience was reading.
And therefore it could help me understand them better.
This is how this magazine ended up on my work desk and I was browsing it whenever I wanted
to procrastinate for a while.
That's how I stumbled upon this article: "Search engines: how to get listed"
Seriously? People struggle with that?
With over seven years of experience in SEO, I could not understand how someone could not know this.
So I pulled Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer tool and entered that headline there.
I checked the top-ranking results and I was totally blown away by the amount of search
traffic that I saw coming to one of the top-ranking articles.
Over 11,000 visits per month from the US alone and 18,000 visits per month globally.
And the top keyword of this article is "submit website to search engines."
Looks like this is the most popular search query that people are using to search for this topic.
And it's search volume is 1,400 searches per month in the US alone.
I thought this was a great topic for us to cover at Ahrefs blog, because people who are looking to submit
their websites to search engines are actually looking to get traffic from search engines.
And that was a perfect opportunity to introduce them to Ahrefs tools.
So guess who published a detailed guide on that topic two months ago?
And today we already rank at position #8 for the main search query - "submit website to search engines."
Which is the bottom of the front page of Google search results.
And in just two months from the publish date, this post has already brought us almost a thousand
vistors from Google search.
Which is quite a decent result for such a short timeframe.
So I hope this was a good example to illustrate how studying your niche and getting in the heads
of your potential customers helps you to create highly relevant content on your blog
and get targeted traffic from Google.
And before we move on to the next strategy, I suggest you to pause this video and take action.
Search on Reddit & Facebook for relevant communities where your target audience
is hanging out.
Spend at least 10 minutes browsing each of these communities
and look for things that bother people the most and the language they use to describe them;
Whenever something strikes you as a great idea for an article on your blog, don't forget
what you've leaned in the previous lesson and test this content idea for search traffic potential
and ranking difficulty.
Try to find at least three cool article ideas, before you move on to the next strategy
that I'm about to show you.
And just in case you need more guidance in researching your niche and getting into the
heads of your pontential customers, we have a great article at Ahrefs blog just about that.
Make sure to check it out.