Melissa Alam is a 20-something social media enthusiast, soccer player, blogger and SEO consultant. Always glued to technology, Melissa enjoys meeting new people, venturing around Philadelphia and blogging about life’s randomness in her free time. Follow her on Twitter @Jogamel88 for a guaranteed good time.
.
As an avid blogger myself, I find myself sometimes lost in a creative rut. I want to create a quality blog post that can appeal and interest my readers (yup, all 4 of them!), yet I’m not sure where to start at times. For those of you that know exactly what I’m talking about, this is your time to raise a virtual hand up and say “No more!”
Unique, non-duplicated content is getting more and more important these days as Google is putting the law down against websites that abuse the web. It’s also important for your blog or site to create a great user experience so that readers can find you as a valuable resource and visit your site again and again. The benefits of creating fresh content are really quite simple. Here’s the equation: quality content = traffic to your blog = you as a happy blogger! I’m here to show you three quick and creative ways to help inspire you to write about content that is relevant for your audience and encourage more visitors to read your blog, so let’s begin:
1. Google Suggest
“What is this Google Suggest tool you speak of Melissa?” you may be asking yourself. Google Suggest (which also go by the name of “Autocomplete”) is simply the suggestion feature that shows up after you start typing a query into the Google Search box. These automatic suggestions are based off many things including search volume as well as your own search history and location. For instance, popular phrases and search queries will show up instantly after you start typing because there are high amounts of search volume relative to those terms or you’ve typed in similar searches due to your past browsing history.
Google Suggest is a great strategy to use when starting blog post topics from scratch. For instance, pretend that you own a blog about Christmas Lights. You want to write content that people are searching for so that you can influence people to see your blog as a valuable resource, but what do you write about? By starting a simple search query in Google Suggest, we find the following:
And voila! According to Google Suggest, you can now write blog posts on Christmas lights for sale, dorms, weddings and for one’s room because these are four search queries that people are actually searching for! Tweak those keywords into your blog post’s title or headline, and add them into the actual body of your content, and you’ve got a head start against writer’s block!
2. Soovle.com
Another fun tool to use is called Soovle.com, which is an engine that aggregates suggested searches from sites like Google, Bing, Amazon, Answers.com, Yahoo, Wikipedia, and YouTube. You can gain a little more insight as to what people are searching for on specific sites, and thus gain some keyword ideas to help inspire writing your blog post some more. Using the same example of searching for the term ‘Christmas lights’, Soovle gives you the following results:
A quick look at this and you’ll notice that people are looking to buy specific colors of Christmas lights on Amazon (how about a blog post on top light color trends?), and a few mentions of Christmas lights in pop culture (how about a post on the top Christmas lights display in movies and television?). Soovle is a great tool to use because it does all of the detective work for you and lets you put the pieces together in your own creative way.
3. UberSuggest.Org
Another great site to use for content creation is UberSuggest, which is a “free keyword tool where you can instantly get thousands of keyword ideas from real user queries!” UberSuggest is very simple to use – type in a keyword or phrase and get a ton of search results in alphabetical order! Here are some results I got when typing in our good ole’ Christmas Lights into the search engine:
By clicking on some of the results, you can get a more specific look at content ideas. I highlighted the “Christmas lights dorm room” result so that you can see that ideas on how to hang and decorate your Christmas lights appear for you to write content around. As for “Christmas lights fire hazard,” you can see that a blog post on indoor vs. outdoor Christmas lights could be a relevant idea for your readers since they are searching for fire hazards associated with both types.
All in all, Google Suggest, Soovle, and UberSuggest are just three great tools to help you overcome your own form of writer’s block and encourage you to keep writing blog posts. By using one (or all) of these simple-to-use tools, you can start a content creation calendar for your blog that not only brings readers to your site consistently, but also takes the stress out of your blogging life so that you can enjoy living your ‘other’ life… you know, away from the computer.
