As a blogger you need to write new articles on a regular basis. But sometimes your mind just goes blank and you have no idea what to write about.
If you want to be successful with your blog you need to cover subjects of interest to your audience. Give answers to the most important questions of your readers and write about things that piques your readers’ curiosity. But how can you look into their minds?
There are ways to find out what people are looking for. You just need to know the right tools. Here we go.
Cover actual trends
By covering actual trends you will be able to generate a lot of additional traffic for your website. Especially if you are registered for Google News you can expect real traffic storms. By the way. Have you already read my article which describes how to submit a blog to Google News?
There are many ways to find out what’s trending on the internet. Let’s start with some general tips.
Read, listen and think
Reading and following the top-news blogs in your niche allows us to stay ahead of our competitors. Especially blogs from the US or China often cover issues which become trending topics in South Africa days, weeks or even months later than in countries which play a leading role in your field.
It is also worth to follow US american social news aggregation sites like digg.com, reddit.com and sphinn.com in order to discover popular topics before others do.
Also Google offers a couple of tools which support you in finding latest search trends. In my opinion, the most valuable tool is:
Google Insights for Search
With Google Insights for Search you are able to check what people search for. Just type in one to five search terms and Google Insights for Search will display the search volume of the last week or month or year for those keywords.
Though the tool doesn’t display absolut numbers of search queries, it is a nice tool to discover trends. You can see in which countries or areas people search most for specific keywords and you can also see rising searches and top searches. Especially the rising searches column is interesting in order to find hot topics to write about. You can even leave the search terms field empty and just use the filters to find hot topics and trends in your specific niche and area. Check out this article on blueglass.com in order to find out how. Unfortunately in South Africa many categories and filter options are not yet available.
In the last 30 days many people searched for “facebook ending” and “facebook shutting down”. If I had written an article about this wrong rumour I could have generated a lot of traffic. If I just had more time… 😉
Google Trends
Google Trends works in a similiar way to Google Insights for Search. Very Interesting is the fact that Google Trends shows current news and its impact on search behaviour. A worthwhile article idea for this blog could have been the news that Al-Jazeerea appeals for social media help in Egypt:
Google Keyword Tool
Whereas Google Insights for Search only shows relative numbers of search queries, the Google External Keyword Tool also presents absolut numbers which are based on estimates.
Google’s Keyword Tool also provides keyword suggestions and an estimate about the cost per click (CpC) for these keywords in Google Adwords. With this information you are able to deduce the approximate revenue with Google Adsense and therefore profitable keywords and topics.
The Keyword Tool is suitable for the analysis of new keywords and seasonal search behaviour.
Popular Searches
There are many other tools and websites which help in the process of analysing and finding trends. Check out seomoz.org where you can find an aggregation of popular search queries gathered from various sources across the web. At seomoz you can find the top 10 searches from sources like Flickr, Technorati, Google Hot Trends, Ebay Pulse, Amazon etc.
Keyword Questions
Use the Keyword Question tool from Wordtracker Labs in order to find popular questions which often are typed into search engines. By finding and answering these questions (in this example: What is Social Media) you can get some great extra traffic for your website.
Stick to your niche
One last but important hint: stick to your niche and keep your blog consistent. If you have a niche blog stay on topic and do not write about trends which have nothing to do with the topics you normally cover. Your readership will appreciate it.
Tags: Blogging, How to, Traffic, Trends
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