I'm going to show you how to find an unlimited number of topics for your content marketing efforts and equip you so that you can create your own content marketing strategy and become the authority in your niche.
If you're doing the 90 day challenge (or whether you're simply building an authority site organically through the search engines), coming up with new content ideas that you can deliver to your audience is paramount to the process.
If you haven't started creating content yet, you may think “Oh man, I can't think of 90 different things to talk about in my niche!”
This is where we are going to help you tap into that internal voice and help you get started.
Once you start creating content, one post will lead to another.
Then, a year from now, you will have a large audience, you will be an authority in your field, and you will be in a position to easily monetize your content.
It is truly possible to find an infinite number of content marketing ideas-- topics that are highly relevant and topics that have the potential to connect with your audience.
We are going to cover 6 specific websites that you can use to research content marketing ideas.
And it only takes a few minutes to research topic ideas using these websites!
I'm going to be using the how-to-trade-Forex-niche as my example.
I don't actually trade Forex, nor do I know much about it. I do know, however, that it is a competitive niche and a good example to use to research content ideas.
Also, Forex is a good research example because this is a topic that I have never researched before, so I can lead you through this process in an authentic and organic way.
In this video, you can watch me go through the 6 research methods.
Use Google To Generate Ideas
(Just a quick note when you're moving forward with your content marketing-- in theory, you should have more of an understanding of the topic than I have about this one.)
Remember, go with what you know. Do what you're passionate about, what you already love. It makes everything else easier.
[Don’t know what that is for you, read An Exercise To Help You Create The Reality You Deserve]
Firstly, I'm literally going to type in “how to trade Forex” into Google. You will immediately be able to see what questions about Forex that people are searching for.
As Google automatically tells me the common questions that people are looking for, I’ll copy these down into a list of ideas.
Google is automatically giving me ideas of what people look for. You can also hit “space” then “A” and it will give you everything that comes up with an “A.” If you type “space” then “B” it shows everything that comes up with a “B” etc. etc.
If you go to my “keyword research tool” post I tell you the tool that I recommend. That app will do all of that kind of searching, with each letter for you in an automated fashion.
If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you will notice that it also has other search ideas. You can use that information as a content creator.
I wanted to show you the next level of how to do this. As I am looking down the page I am going to pick a link. One of the links I see is “Babypips.com, School of Pipsology.” Next I am going to take this URL: Babypips.com, and I am going to copy it.
Now I'm going to go back to the address bar and type “site” then “colon ( : )” then add the website and click enter. I am literally telling Google “I want you to search for every single page that you have indexed for this website.”
You can see there's about 219,000 results. And I can now look through what Babypips has written.
One thing I notice is that every single result is actually from this domain. So it's got trading insights, frequently asked questions..
Now I can go in their frequently ask questions, and I can look at what they feel their frequently asked questions are. If you find that they have a blog category, you can do this exact same kind of a search for their blog.
Next go to their website to see if there is a blog or if I can find an area that has a ton of content. I see they have a news section. They also have a rates, tools, and education sections.
Let's see what's here. I'm noticing that they have a “how to trade” education forum.
If I go back to the Google search and add “/news” to the address bar, using the site colon trick, now Google will pull up every URL that has news.
I'm trying to show you how to use this site-colon-search parameter so you can search out and find what the topics that other leaders in your niche are writing about. You can then research those topics.
It is important to understand the topics that leaders in your niche are writing about. This keyword research strategy will help you see which topics have high search volumes.
If you find topics that you are interested in, know something about, then you will be able to effortlessly create content on that subject matter.
YouTube
You can employ a similar strategy on YouTube. Just search for your topics just like a user would, take note of the top 10, top 20 different videos. Also look at the related videos in the niche. Those are really basic processes to develop a content strategy plan.
Quora
Next let’s talk about Quora.
Quora is a question and answer website where people from all around the world ask and answer each other’s questions.
You can just type in “how to trade Forex” and it will do an auto population.
After clicking enter I can see it automatically pulls up all of these different questions:
“How do I trade Forex futures?”
“How do I start trading?”
“How to learn trading?”
“What are the best ways to learn trading?”
All of those that might seem really similar but when you're creating a lot of different content, each one of those could be its own blog post.
There are thousands of questions. As I scroll down, the list just gets longer and longer. Each one of these is a potential question from my potential audience that I am trying to grow.
Quora is a great place to generate content marketing ideas.
Yahoo
Another great website is Yahoo Answers. The website’s format is essentially the same as Quora’s--questions and answers.
You would just search Answers the same way you would search Quora. When I type “Forex trading” it instantly comes up with a bunch of questions.
You can search through the “answers.” Right away it's going to bring a giant search result of all of the answers that they have associated with “Forex trading.”
There are 6,263 different questions! Right there we have a ton of material that you can use to craft your own content marketing plan.
Niche Forums
In order to start our next process we're going back to Google--this time to find niche forums.
Niche forums are fantastic places to get ideas for content marketing.
Just search “forum, trading Forex.”
I'm going to look at one called “forexfactory.com” because this is a new site we haven't been to yet.
On the right side of the page, it shows how many different replies there are.
Sort by “most replies” so that you can see what the hottest topics are.
The most commented on topic is often the most controversial.
There is a thread named “MT4 trading the gap with Excel” and it discusses a specific trading methodology.
Using this information, you can create content on how to trade Forex using Excel sheets.
There are 314 pages full of results and these forums can provide you with many topic ideas for your own content.
Also, engage in these forums. Create an account and create conversations with the users. Don’t promote your content or spam other users, but add a link to your website in your signature and try to learn from the folks in these forums.
Your ability to be a fly on the wall in these conversations is huge.
Forums give you access to many really powerful ideas, ideas that are engaging to your hypothetical audience.
This kind of research takes time and energy, but it pays off in the long term.
Amazon.com
Amazon is one of my favorite research methods and I have a really cool trick for you: the best-seller’s list.
Do a search for Forex books and find their best-selling Forex trading books.
Another tip, click on the image of the book, look inside the book, and find the table of contents.
Here are all of the most essential topics:
“What's a risk reward ratio?”
“What are the different types of orders?”
“How many Pipps is enough?”
These chapter titles can give us great ideas to use in our content marketing plan.
I'm obviously not advocating plagiarism. However, since it isn’t practical to read every single book on this topic, this method provides an easy strategy for harvesting new ideas.
The “look inside” feature on Amazon is one of the most effective ways for you to get inspired about your topic, and to aid in your own processes of idea synthesis.
Wrap it up
These 6 ways of finding topics are the most powerful ways to generate new ideas.
If you haven't started writing yet, come up with three or four ideas and get started!
Do one video a day or one blog post a day.
Get your first post going and then dig into the research to create your content strategy plan from your list of topics to scale.
These research methods are also helpful if you've been doing content marketing for a long time and you feel like you’ve hit a wall. Use one of these six different techniques to help you find new, fresh ideas.
Remember--don’t plagiarize--rather use these research methods as inspiration to find new ideas, ideas from which you can create many posts and videos.
Happy creating!