Yoav Vilner is CEO at Ranky, the startup-marketing team. He’s helping startups grow and then shares his insights regularly at Forbes, Entrepreneur, Inc, TheNextWeb, ReadWrite and VentureBeat.
If the engagement in your company’s blog posts resembles a graveyard – you are far, far behind your competition.
This assumption has tons of research behind it; did you know that companies with active blogs see 60 percent more online sales, as well as earn 97 percent more natural links from people enjoying the posts?
After marketing startups for almost six years, trying about 200 tools and testing results on an infinite amount of websites, I’ll be presenting the best tricks that will help you find amazing topics to write about. These titles could help you nail your competitors’ organic traffic and outrank their blog posts in the future.
Ubersuggest
The first and most natural way is to find desired headlines that people are Googling for every day. Ubersuggest is a free tool that scrapes all of Google’s auto-suggest search phrases. Before Ubersuggest, we had to Google for a phrase and add a different first letter every time, like so:
Ubersuggest displays the entire set of results that Google’s auto-complete would show you after multiple searches, from A-Z, like so:
I consider this tool to be one of the biggest time savers and inspiration givers of the century. But don’t write based only on suggestions, as what good are they without a decent search volume? Your next step would be pouring your chosen headlines into Google’s Keyword Planner and sort them by search volume.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia has a lot of inspiration for desired topics to write about in your own business blog, so you better start taking advantage of it before your competitors find out about it.
What you need to do is very simple, just head over to a generic term on Wikipedia and look for the table of contents.
In this case, I went over to the “online marketing” page in Wikipedia – if my business blog is about online marketing, then I’ve just found a lot of informative topics I could write about and help my target audience.
Google’s keyword planner could come in handy in this step as well, as it can show you related and more searched-for terms around those “dry” topics.
QuickSprout
One of the best methods I know for getting blog topics shared more than your competitors, is finding the topics that were shared the most already by the same audience – and re-write them just a tiny bit better and longer.
QuickSprout is Neil Patel’s own blog. The person behind the best analytics software in the world is now offering a free way to analyze your industry’s most shared blog topics, giving you valuable insight into what is most likely to go viral.
OpenSiteExplorer
One of my all-time favorite tools. OpenSiteExplorer lets you perform a reverse-engineering process on any given website and see where it’s linked from. The secret trick here, in case a staff member of the website is a popular blogger – you can easily see a list of all the external posts he had wrote in various blogs – is to get inspiration of which of his posts saw the most engagement and traction.
In this case, if you research for my site, you will find my different columns in Forbes, Entrepreneur, Venturebeat, TheNextWeb, Inc. and more – just see which topics were shared and viewed the most, and there you go – a real life proof those topics are worthy of your time.
Using a combination of the above websites can help make finding compelling content that your audience cares about easy and stress-free.
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.