What's Inside
Just like I show you in the road map to steady and abundant cash flow, the key to building an engaged audience is using your know-how and experience to help your ideal visitors solve urgent problems and achieve their most desired goals.
If you follow my road map, you will have at least one hundred ideas for great content to put on your website.
The three-step path to popular content creation
- To quickly create traffic generating content, you need to tap into what’s already popular (which I’ll cover below).
- Then use these awesome fill-in-the-blank title templates to give your content a catchy title and help you structure your article.
- Lastly, do a little bit of SEO to help structure your content and make it attractive to search engines (link to 1-2 authoritative related websites, add subheadings, images (use alt text, relevant file names, and descriptions), embed Youtube video, sprinkle keywords and keyword variations in your title, subtitles and content, and perhaps a table of contents. Use an SEO plugin to add meta description and keywords to your articles).
The last set of SEO steps are not mandatory right away, but can help you shorten the period to attract “organic” (search engine) traffic. Now, let’s find that popular content!
Finding what’s popular in your market niche
Here are five ways to generate popular article topics:
Question and Answer Sites
Visit Q&A websites like Yahoo Answers or Quora. Find the most popular questions people are asking about your topic. Answer the question on your own website. On one website I wrote an article and gave it the title of the question on Yahoo Answers and it is the most popular article (in terms of monthly and all time visitors) on the site.
Niche forums and discussion boards
Find forums in your niche and the threads with the most views, or most views and responses. Answer the same question on your site. (Bonus tip; You can join the forum later and direct members to your article as a resource, or include the article in your member signature, which pays off if you become an active member with lots of posts; same goes for sites like Quora, mentioned above).
One popular mega forum type site is Reddit (I checked out their stats on SimilarWeb for this article and Reddit is the 37th most popular website in the world, with 1.5 billion visits a MONTH.) I would also use a search engine (Google or Bing) to find forums where your ideal audience congregates. you can also use a search engine like Boardreader.
Find popular social media content using Buzzsumo. While a paid account will give you much more results, the free option works for our purposes as we are looking for the most popular content. There are two ways to use Buzzsumo. Do a topic search by putting a topic (preschool) or customer type keyword (e.g. working moms) into the search box.
You’ll find the most shared content on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest. You can sort to find the most popular content on each platform. (What’s popular on each platform is usually different!) The second way to use Buzzsumo is to put in the url of a popular site or competitor in your space and find the most popular content on their website.
Popular online videos
Find popular videos on YouTube. YouTube is more than a video site; it’s really a type of search engine. The amount of content on the platform is staggering. Type industry and customer keywords and see what comes up.
Find the most popular content and create something similar on your website. If it’s a list, create a bigger list. If it’s how to, do your own step by step guide. Better yet, do an article and turn that into a video (talking head using your phone or slideshow or screenshare). Update your article with an embed of the video you create. Win win!
Specific long tail phrases
Discover the long tail. The idea here is to write articles targeting keywords no one else is optimizing their own sites for. Every month, Google processes more than 100 billion searches per month, and incredibly, 15% of those are new and unique, never searched for terms. How do you find it?
Two good sources are UberSuggest.io and AnswerthePublic.com. Both sites give you what people are actually searching for vs vague overly competitive keywords.It’s best if you use the Chrome browser and install the Keywords Everywhere extension, which will give you search volumes of keywords on different sites right in your browser!
Follow along as I use this content strategy
In another post, I’m going to follow my own advice and give you an example of the kinds of article topics you can find. Then, I’ll write the articles and track my results for you!