Today I’m going to share with you a simple but highly effective way to come up with an endless stream of new topics to blog about.
I’ve seen a lot of posts and articles that give ideas on how to make sure you have a continual flow of content for blogs. Most of them pretty much say the same things:
- Make notes when ideas come to mind
- Keep a clippings file
- Look at news in your industry
- Provide a different angle to an existing blog post
- etc etc
These ideas work well if you already have an established readership or a way to send traffic to your blog. But what if you don’t? Or what if you want to draw new traffic to your blog?
There’s one grossly underrated tool that can help you come up with new ideas that people are actually interested in – Google’s Keyword Tool. I suggest you open the link so you can better follow along with the explanations.
Here’s How to Use Google’s Keyword Tool to Generate New Blog Ideas
- Click “sign in” at the top right in order to get access to all data and more keyword suggestions (a Google account is required).
- In the “word or phrase” section, enter in one or more keywords.
- Click “advanced options and filters” and select a particular country and language if you need specific targeting or “all countries” and “all languages” if you don’t.
- Match type (left side) – I deselect “broad” and select “exact”.
- Choose columns to display (right side) – I select “local search trends” and “approximate cpc” from the drop down. “Competition”, “global monthly searches” and “local monthly searches” should already be selected.
- Click the “search” button.
- I then click on the “global monthly searches” column on the “Keyword Ideas” results so that it will sort the results based on the number of searches.
You’ll see that the results are grouped into 2 sections: search terms (the keywords you entered) and keyword ideas. You can export the results to work with the data by clicking “download” above the search terms section.
What Each Column Means
Keyword – if you did match type = exact, the keyword results will be shown in brackets. This means the data is relevant to people that searched or advertised on that exact term.
Competition – this will give you an idea of how popular a keyword is amongst advertisers. If the box is completely filled, it is a competitive term. Bad if you are an advertiser but good news if you are a blogger running Adsense.
Global Monthly Searches – this shows you the average searches per month for the combination “all countries” and “all languages”.
Local Monthly Searches – this shows you the average searches per month for the geographic region/language you selected.
Local Search Trends – this shows the past 12 months of search volume for the geographic region/language you selected and can help you see whether interest in a keyword is growing or waning amongst those searching for it. It can also help you see seasonal trends.
Approximate CPC – this is what you can expect to pay per click if you are advertising on this term on Google Adwords. It is the average amount paid per click across all ad positions. Where this is relevant for you is if you are running Adsense on your site – it can give you an idea of what earnings you can expect compared to other keywords.
If you find that the results are very general, you can take one or more of the higher volume terms and re-run a search on those to come up with more focused topics.
Why Does This Work?
There are a few reasons why this works very well:
- You can find out what people are interested in rather than what you think they are interested in.
- You can structure blog posts around phrases that will help search engines bring traffic to your blog.
- It can help identify areas of interest so that you can get more exposure when promoting via social media.
- If your blog is your business, it can help you identify topics that are of interest to advertisers and get an idea of how much the traffic is potentially worth.
- If you are trying to establish your blog as an “authority”, it will help you see gaps in the topics you cover.
Do you use this method yourself? What do you do to ensure you have a continual flow of material for your blog?
Photograph by antigone78
