How do you come up with ideas to write content that will attract traffic to your website? That’s the $1m question every specialist in inbound marketing asks. After more than 15 years of blogging and 4000 articles, here are my 5 sources of inspiration and the 5 tools I use all the time.
Summary
- Source n°1 : news
- Source n°2 : sectorial watch
- Source n°3 : Ahrefs
- Source n°4 : scientific publications
- Source n°5 : Google
If you only have 30 seconds
- I have 5 channels of inspiration for my articles: news, industry information, SEO research, scientific articles, Google search engine
- I use 5 tools to find inspiration: Get Day Trends, Google Trends, Ahrefs, Google Search Console, Google Scholar
- Keyword research with Ahrefs allows me to detect topics that attract traffic and have little competition
- Following the daily trends allows me to react very quickly to the news and to be the first to publish an article on a particular subject
Source of inspiration n°1: the news
Content that is relevant to current events is the most likely to generate audience peaks on your website. Following the news closely will also allow you, if you write quickly, to be referenced first on Google.
To find “hot” content, I use the following tools
- Twitter trends with Get Day trends
- Search trends with Google Trends
- Newspaper reading: I read 3 economic newspapers daily to feed my marketing thinking
Case study: how I exploded my traffic record thanks to LIDL
In 2020, between Christmas and New Year, I spotted one morning on Get Day Trends that a hashtag was exploding. It was #LIDL. The low-cost supermarket had just put its “sneakers” on sale in France, and the French twitters were going crazy. So, I wrote an article about the phenomenon very quickly. I pushed it on Twitter, allowing me to get several thousands of visits in a few days.
Source of inspiration n°2: the sectorial watch
Every morning I do a quick review of the latest news in the following sectors: retail, IT/digital, entrepreneurship, media. In particular, I look at the fundraising news on 3 different websites to understand the dynamics of the start-up ecosystem.
Thanks to this sectorial watch I can;
- quickly identify essential themes in the sectors that interest me and write a blog post if necessary
- make links between sectors, especially regarding the use of new technologies, and propose a value-added analysis
ADVICE
The added value of a story comes from the crossovers you can make. Don’t try to tell a known story differently. Make comparisons, and don’t be afraid to give your opinion.
Source d’inspiration n°3 : Ahrefs
One of the most classic techniques is identifying keywords that generate search volume and are not very “competitive.” All that remains is to write an article around the keyword in question.
To do this, you need a specialized tool like Ahrefs (or Moz or SEO Majestic). You can then spend hours exploring families of keywords and looking for those that seem most interesting. In the example below, a search for “data visualization” shows a search volume of 2700/month and a difficulty of 2 to enter the top 10 search results.
This is how I managed to get my articles on data visualization and data preparation to the top of the search results.
Advice
If you use Ahrefs, make sure you only choose keywords with a volume greater than 1000 and a KD (Keyword Difficulty) score of less than 5.
Source of inspiration n°4: scientific articles
My other source of inspiration is skimming articles published in scientific journals in my field. I have a list of 8 titles that I go through once every 2 months. This way, I can find exciting research that allows me to talk about the results on my blog.
Advice
Create an alert in Google Scholar to notify the latest publications on the subjects that interest you. You will always be at the forefront of the newest knowledge and can position yourself as a reference.
Source of inspiration n°5: Google
My final source of inspiration is the Google search engine itself. The suggestions proposed by Google when you type in your keywords are recurring searches. So, you can use them to find inspiration.
Advice
Use the asterisk to discover new exciting combinations of keywords. The example below shows which words are typed before the keyword “market research.”
Posted in Misc..
