In 1996, Bill Gates coined the phrase “Content is King.” Today, it is one of the more critical aspects of growing a web presence for any brand or business. You can try all the latest tricks and trends, but content will always bring visitors to your site.
Researching topics is a key part of establishing a good framework for building the best content. Here are some of the best tools and sites that I use on an ongoing basis to create meaningful and compelling content.
1. Google Document Tool
Copy this E-Content Generator document, and save it to your list of Google files in your Google Drive. You just saved a gem in your toolbox.
In order to get the document tool to work, enter your keyword in box B-3 and press enter/return. It’ll start the query for your keyword and the spreadsheet will provide real-time search information thru Google News, Bing News, Twitter, Facebook, and other top sources.
All this information provides you with an outline of what is being said for your target keyword each day. You can create another document with a list of brainstorm ideas that could potentially be used for your piece of content.
2. Google Trends
Google Trends is a great way to see the search query trends for your target keyword. It provides you with an overview of the interest for your target keyword in the various countries/regions/cities.
These are great insights because it gives you a range to see if people are searching for your target keyword in a certain geographic location. Another thing is to aim at finding keywords that have an upward graph as it demonstrates that they are growing Google search queries.
3. Reddit
Reddit is one of the most popular sites on the web. AskReddit is the modern Yahoo! Answers for the younger generation. It’s a great resource for finding out content on a given subject.
Type in your target keyword and see if Reddit has asked a question on it. If you do find that Reddit has asked a question on it you can use the crowdsourced answers for ideas for generating content.
For example, let’s say you have a wedding site, and you want to write a content piece on people who canceled their weddings. You type “Weddings” and find a list of goodies. You find one link that fits perfectly for your content.
Within the link you have user-generated content on your keyword. You could use this content for an infographic, a list, a video, or any other way you could think of.
As mentioned, AskReddit can be used to submit a question that will help you with content creation. This a good way to see if people are interested in your question. It’s a hit or miss with the Reddit community, but it’s a worth shot since it only takes five minutes to create.
4. Keyword.Alltop.com
Alltop is an aggregator of content from top sites and blogs that displays it in a fashion where you can read the title of their most recent articles. This gives you the ability to see if each site has similar content and to see what’s trending on the web.
As everyone jumps on the content marketing bandwagon you need the tools to be ahead of the curve. These tools give you a broad reach of what is trending on Google, Bing, Facebook and Twitter. It provides you with a starting point in your content marketing efforts. If after reading this post it motivated or provided you with a short cut then I did my job. Thank your for your time.
Eric Sornoso is president of Fish Free Media and can be found at @esornoso on Twitter.