How To Find Out What People Want |
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If you write articles on a regular basis, you are most likely doing it because you enjoy writing about that topic, and / or, you want to try to find a way to make money by writing about a topic. I believe if you focus on the former the ladder will eventually happen, but I covered that in another article. In either case I bet you have run into these common problems. You can't think of anything to write about and you don't know if anyone will care about what you write. Even if you are one of the few who can always think of something to communicate, you will eventually want to find out more about who is reading your content, and how to create content that is more compelling to your audience. Most big companies will run out and do a survey. They pay millions of dollars a year collecting data on customers and potential customers. With their marketing budget, they can afford to try multiple forms of marketing. Television ads, print, radio, the internet and more. If a big corporation doesn't get the message right the first time, they have the budget and time to tweak it. If they get it right, they will reap huge profits to easily make up for any mistakes they have made. As a side note, I belong to a couple survey sites myself. It is a great way to make a little extra money when you have a few minutes. It generally requires doing a large number of surveys to get any kind of reward. But when you are eating lunch at your desk, or don't feel like thinking to hard for 5-15 minutes, it can get you a gift card or something every couple months. Anyway, the point is, they resell that data for large sums of money. Do a Google Search for targeted email lists and you will not believe the prices. These methods are just not for someone like me. If I spend a large amount of money on marketing and advertising it has to work. If it doesn't I'm done. Time to go back to the day job and save some money for that next great idea. You have to take risks. But that is just too big of a risk for me. So how can you get around spending a lot of time and / or money collecting user data? Go find out what people are asking for. There are several ways to do this, but one of my favorite ways is Google's External Keyword tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. I know a lot of you probably already use this, especially if you are doing anything with PPC (pay per click). This is a great tool for creating you next article idea though also. For example, I've had pets all my life, mostly cats. You could say I'm a bit of an expert at raising house cats. It's something I do not correspond about. But let's say I did and was just out of ideas. The KeywordToolExternal is a free tool. In this example, I just go there and type in cats to get a broad list of results. In my case I'm looking for ideas, so I sort by search volume. About 10 lines down I see something that get's nearly a 1,000,000 searches a month, "cats dogs"! I'm guessing people are looking about information about how to raise a dog and a cat in the same house. It's something I've never thought about much but I could easily write a few hundred words about how to get cats and dogs to get along. Now I go back and type cats dogs in the search box and try to get more related search terms. These phrases related to "cats dogs" should give me plenty of ideas for my article. Usually, you will find enough keywords to create an outline and generate some original content. In this case though, I see something in the sub results of "cats dogs" that could make a great article too. "Cats dogs movies", is something that has to interest pet lovers. Stay tuned for my next article. My favorite cat movies. Just kidding, but you get the idea. You can find out what kind of information people are looking for in your niche for free. They are already searching for it. |
