With every company having some form of content marketing system, it’s important that you have a method in place to help separate you from the pack. The same basic set of blog posts introducing someone to your niche or covering fundamental topics will only go so far. This is for a variety of reasons, including:
Heavy competition for keywords/SEO on these topics
Oversaturated subject matter
Having lower traffic, as it may be dispersed among other potential articles
Heading into 2020, it’s time to reevaluate some of the ways you come up with your content marketing topics. This will help your content have both the novelty and uniqueness that drives traffic and conversions.
Spinning The Conventional Options
For those who are just starting out in the world of content marketing, an element of your strategy may be establishing a small blog with a few starter topics. Trying to find a topic that hasn’t been covered already can seem overwhelming, but you can get things started by turning around some of the topics you’ve already covered. Noam Judah, the founder of Melbourne SEO and Web Design Agency offers some input on this scenario:
“Spinning a boring content topic is a great way to refresh it without requiring a lot of additional research or work. For example, rather than doing the conventional ‘10 facts about X topic,’ you can make a slight modification to ‘10 myths busted about X.’ It still has that same informative tone and can cover a lot of the same topics, but this different format instantly sets your topics apart.”
Furthermore, a good way to instantly reverse any topic for your benefit is looking for the other side of the negative/positive dichotomy. Swap an existing positive topic like “How To Improve Your X” to a negative one “Mistakes People Make While Doing X,” and you have two articles for the work of one.
Title Generation and Keyword Research
One common strategy that a lot of people use when it comes to content marketing topics is keyword research. Choose your tool/platform of choice, then build content around some of the most popular ones you see. The caveat here is that, if the competition is heavy, your work here may not have the SEO benefit you initially intended. Axel DeAngelis, the founder of Namebounce, offers a way to turn this on its head:
“My favorite strategy has been to research keywords where I could use my name generator tool as a content anchor. Creating any type of tool or calculator has a higher barrier to entry than traditional content, and it’s possible to create a tool that fits a number of different keywords. While it’s difficult to create a tool like a business name generator, other companies make it possible for anyone to add calculators to their website quickly.”
If you don’t have a name generator tool in your arsenal, you can still use some of these basic concepts. There are name and topic generators out there you can use to try and draw on topics from outside of what you’ve already covered.
Following The Competition
Sometimes, the amount of concepts that you have in mind isn’t enough to fill out your content calendar. Christian Antonoff, marketing and PR manager at ExcelTemplate, shared a basic concept to use:
“When in need of fresh blog topics, I often check what the competition has been up to. Maybe they found something interesting to talk about. If so, then I take that and spin it from a different angle to present a different point of view.”
When looking at these same competitive articles, you should also take some time to read what the comment sections say, as these can potentially be a treasure trove of content. A lot of the time, in comments, issues may appear that are either improperly addressed or ignored in the article. You have the benefit of being able to jump on a topic that has already been proven to be interesting to your audience that your competition hasn’t already covered.
It’s also a good idea to try and do some keyword research on your competitors’ websites. If they are deeply entrenched in a certain keyword, it’s not worth pursuing. If they have a weaker hold, you can start building content to overtake them.
