The biggest mistake a business or content writer can make when it comes to content marketing is writing BEFORE figuring out what to write about. In a fast-paced industry, it’s easy to throw money at a writer (or take money from a client) without knowing what you intend to write about.
Here’s the thing. If you don’t know what you’re writing about, then you’re not going to write great content. You’re going to write subpar content and you’ll probably waste a lot of your marketing budget with zero ROI or be the writer who doesn’t get any conversions on their content.
The most painful part of this is that it is so avoidable.
As a business owner looking to create content, you can easily find the topics that your avatars want to know about so that when you, or a freelance writer, write that content—you know your customer cares about it.
For example, let’s say that I want to write content for the people who would be interested in this Writing Guideline.
Here’s where I would start:
Step #1: Go to www.quora.com and type in your product or niche in the right-hand search bar. Depending on how niche your subject is, there may or may not be a topic written about it. If there is a topic, click that. If there isn’t search through the questions with that keyword in it.
These Quora results are going to be questions that you’ll formulate your content around. For example, here are two questions that I could answer in my content geared towards people interested in content writing:
What does your content creation process look like?
What does an SEO content writer need to know about backlinks in 2020?
Keep scrolling the Quora questions on your results page and using different keywords to find more related questions.
Step #2: Use www.answerthepublic.com to figure out more questions being asked around your keyword. Each week you get a certain amount of free searches before you have to pay for a monthly subscription. Just like you did with Quora, you’re going to search for your keyword(s) in their search box at the bottom of the above-the-fold content of their landing page.
Their search results are going to show you all of the web’s searched questions using your keyword(s). In this example using “content writing” as the keyword, you’ll see a diagram of all the questions of search queries by starting preposition and by comparisons. When you scroll down you’ll see a list of search queries in alphabetical order. This should give you tens (if not hundreds) of ideas as to what content to write.
For example, from these results, I could pull the following article topics to publish on the topic of content writing:
Where to learn content writing
Is content writing a good career
Where to find content writing jobs
What is content writing in digital marketing
How content writing is important
Note: The above link is an affiliate link, which means that if you sign up for AnswerThePublic through that link, I’ll receive a commission. I’ve been using AnswerThePublic for months before they offered me the affiliate link, so while I do make commision, this platform would have made it into this guide whether I did or not.
Step #3: The final step for figuring out what topics to cover in your content writing is to ask people. People can either be: current customers or your prospects. For example, if you’re working with a business or are a business that doesn’t have customers yet, you’ll want to go into related Facebook groups and ask people what questions they have about your product.
Let me be clear, I’m not saying to ask, “What questions do you have about Eva’s Writing Guideline?. I’m telling you to ask, “What questions do you have about content writing?”.
For content writing, I would reach out to freelancer groups and digital nomad groups to get my answers. The easiest way to figure out what Facebook groups exist for your industry is to search on Facebook for your keyword and related keywords.
Now, if you have customers or your client has customers you’ll want to ask them questions like:
What was your biggest hesitation prior to buying our product?
What made you think that this product was the answer you’ve been looking for?
What other products were you looking at alongside ours?
What is your favorite part about using this product?
If you had to describe our product in 3 words, what words would you use?
See how clearly we can write content now? We know exactly what the people we are writing content for want to read. This means that your ad dollars won’t go to waste on content that your customers don’t care about and that you’ll be able to get your client’s an ROI.
Exciting, right?
If you know someone that is not creating content that their customers care about, share this post with them. You can forward the email or click the button below.
Thanks for caring about what content you’re putting out into the world. Because of people like you, content marketing just got a little more human 🙌🏼.