At the very beginning of my blogging career, it took me almost 3 days just to pick a topic, though writing and publishing an article only 5 hours. Agree, for a blogger it's an enormous waste of time, and it always costs a lot. There's no standard textbook rule on how to select the best topics for any audience. Since each reader has own particular problems, fears, desires, needs and interests. Besides, you should mind the fact that any topic can be either long-term or short-term.
To handle this daunting task you need to make 4 essential steps. Each one starts with a question but proceeds with proven techniques resulting in many shares.
What's Your Blogging Niche?
If you haven't chosen what to write about in your blog you need to come up with a few things you can talk at least for a couple of months. Think of a subject that matters to you now and will be substantial even in 2 or 3 years. You shouldn't know this niche up to 100%, at least 90%. You need those ten per cent to grow as a personality or a professional.
Thus, your passion will keep on burning, and your interest in the topic will stay contagious to the reader. In case you feel already bored with those insurance issues you deal with every day at work, don't even try to hold the same blog niche. Because after a third article, you'll most likely hit the ceiling and have thoughts of quitting your current job.
To generate new items on the same topic, you must like the idea of communicating unique solutions to your audience problems. First, think of your hobbies. Perhaps, you fancy playing the guitar in a band and can become a writing guide to those who struggle between work and their real passions. Now, you've chosen your blogging niche but found dozens of posts and bloggers on the same subject.
It shouldn't scare you as you can also become an expert in the same field. There's no need to make an extra research of an unusual niche because if you have knowledge and experience to share, your attitude and outlook can still become popular among your readers.
Who Are You Readers And What Do They Want?
The second step to crafting a good topic is to define who your target audience is and what their interests and problems are. You've already determined your area of expertise. So, if you are more technical than a creative writer and can dwell on cars as a real expert, do not take new unexplored but money-generating topics only for this reason.
The thing about your area of expertise is a unique experience you can share with a reader and bring him new solutions. Let's take a student as a reader of your blog. If you hold a secret tip on how to manage studying and
There are 5 issues you face determining your target audience:
- Your reader's problem and the best solution you can deliver
- Your reader's fear and how you can help to overcome it
- New fascinating ways in solving your reader's issues
- Reader's goals you can help to achieve
- Entertaining data that can interest your reader
What New Ideas Can Inspiring Services Bring You?
The best way to figure out what topics are doomed to success is to find already prospering blogs considering the same niche and target audience. Here we do not talk about plagiarizing their posts. No, they will become your examples to follow. You'll see what trending and evergreen articles are selected and in what succession they are published.
You just copycat experience of already working topics. Knowing your reader and his habits, you can easily distinguish at least seven inspiring services with active blogs in your area of expertise. I took these examples to demonstrate how simply you can do the same.
According to the eBizMBARank survey, Huffington Post takes the first place among other favorite blogs with estimated rank of 110 000 000 visitors per month. This is #1 place to find your inspiration in a huge variety of topics.
Everyday items discovered on this blog may not involve your niche or target audience. However, you can use its familiar formulas and approaches to presenting data. You can also appeal to an absolute solution in your blog and easy-to-read lists that serve as helpful tips. In this case, you just copy the style and technique, though the information you provide will be unique and targeted on your defined reader.
It covers 3 most readable topics - business, celebrities, and technologies. Even if you are going to write about medicine topics, you can make use of Business Insider methods to presenting data and reliable evidence from experts.
Being a multilingual service with ten blog articles written in English, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, German, Polish and even Korean this network is just a vast island of inspiration and different examples how to engage a reader from Europe, Asia and North America with your blog topics.
I've already mentioned students as a particular target audience which is the biggest in almost every niche. This blog keeps in touch with every trend in education and technologies. It has entertaining and useful information on how to write an essay or manage time having hot exam rush.
This news service can also serve as a helpful tool for generating ideas to your blog. Its broad scope of expertise can assist you in conducting your independent research on a specified topic.
It certainly has an unconventional approach to blogging, and you can find plenty of funny, serious, entertaining and educational posts that may even include your niche and audience interests.
I can explain my choice of these blogs considering their efficiency, popularity rates among readers, unique content management techniques of engagement and retention. Also, each service has unique features that make it stand out among others.
So, by now we've already clarified 3 main ways to crafting your blog's content plan - your blogging niche, target audience and samples to make your inspiration work. Now, let's become more precise and scrutinize on the type of a topic. What is a lifespan of a subject? And how does its type influence your choice?
Is Your Topic Trending Or Evergreen?
A trending topic has a short lifespan and covers current hot news. An evergreen topic, on the other hand, can keep being relevant and useful for a much longer time. Both types are necessary for your blog, and you can't use only one type to increase traffic and conversion.
Compare two Huffington Post articles:
"6 Silly Mistakes You Make In Pursuit Of Happiness" - this evergreen topic can make interested more people daily regarding the fact that "happiness" is an evergreen keyword itself. There are no entirely happy people and every time your reader feels sad or depressed he or she may return to this topic and find your blog encouraging and useful. Evergreen topics keep their relevancy in social networks longer and can earn social shares during the whole lifespan.
Relevancy not popularity determines evergreen topics as lead generators. Hence, your topic must be relevant to your niche first, defined target audience and estimated problems. Furthermore, this relevancy should take into consideration your primary goals such as getting more subscribers. And most important, relevancy is your ability to offer hot-shot solutions that work for an individual audience notwithstanding time and place.
Another eye-catching news in tech blog is clearly a trending topic.
"Toyota Recalls 1.6 Million U.S. Vehicles Over Defective Air Bags."
Yep, it will raise some interest among car lovers but views may last only 3-5 days, and you'll have to figure out some evergreen topics to drive traffic to your blog.
According to Google Analytics, trending topic page views may exceed twice as much in comparison with the evergreen topic, though the last will work with the same result from a month to a few years. An experienced content manager will work more on developing evergreen topics and optimizing them for search engines.
Using a requested set of keywords in your posts and compelling meta descriptions will help to get those clicks for the high ranking and conversion. You can also use link building as an additional tool to boost your traffic. Of course, you'll need to cooperate with other bloggers in a similar field of expertise.
You must omit any dates in your evergreen posts and customers' comments since it may significantly decrease viewing results. If any visitor notices your blog article is 3 years old, he'll consider even the most useful information outdated. And don't treat it as some dishonest act towards your readers because your topic is still relevant, helpful and can attract more visitors to a widespread and shared problem. Don't miss the chance to promote your blog posts through social networks which can make them trending and challenge your topic's actuality once again.
Also, if you want to sustain the popularity of your post, always reply to questions in each comment. Because after you've claimed to be an expert in a certain field, you must prove you care about your audience and its problems. Don't get lazy to reread comments every single day if you want an evergreen topic to work consistently and grow some subscribers to your blog.
Are You Ready To Face Your Success?
Nobody is born a perfect blogger. Thus, every second post will teach you something as well as your followers. Now, let's sum up everything described in those 4 guiding steps for you to thrive as a blogger.
- Determine relevancy within your niche, audience, goals and solutions to apply to your topics.
- Define an exact number of questions that will serve as evergreen and trending.
- Implement search engine optimization tools to keep your blog's conversion on the highest ranking.
- Don't mention dates in evergreen articles and comments to them. It may work against your blog's relevancy.
- Always mind data validity and try your recommendations to stay concise but useful enough.
- Get used to digging information and comparing different approaches to an individual problem.
- Use as many examples and references in your articles to sustain your blog's reliability and your proficiency level.
- Be responsive and don't let any question in your customer's comment proceed ignored.
Veronica Hunt is a true edtech expert and a freelance writer at essay writing service
essaybuyers.com. She tries to provide students with up-to-date info on how to ease studying process.