Blogging is a great way to improve brand awareness and generate new leads, but it can be difficult to plan content that will help you reach these goals. Blog content needs to be regular, targeted, and engaging. If it doesn’t fit these criteria, the benefits gained won’t come close to matching the amount of investment required.
Luckily, there are some easy ways to plan content that appeals to traffic from multiple sources, including search engines and social media. You can publish content that is relevant, trending, and able to draw in new traffic that wants to engage and have a relationship with your online business.
Google Trends
The cornerstone of any content strategy is research, and there is no other tool for this that can offer the same power as Google Trends. That’s because Google processes several billion searches every day. The company knows better than anyone else exactly what topics are trending, and they have the baseline statistics going back over many years to track changes in interest.
Google Trends is great for planning content aimed at search engine traffic in combination with other tools like the AdWords Keyword Planner. It’s also an incredible option for making content that appeals to both social media and referrals.
Google Trends gives you the peace of mind of knowing that there’s a market for relevant and timely information, and you can gain backlinks and social media shares easily by providing quality content that no one else has produced yet. Some of the things you can do with the tool include:
- Finding related subjects with growing traffic
- Determining how stable the traffic to a topic or niche is
- Tracking any seasonal trends in topics or niches
- Discovering brand new topics with limited competition
Social Media Trends
Social media platforms like Instagram and Pinterest showcase trending topics, and this can be a great way of not only planning new content that meets a missing demand but also building your social media presence up. Giving a social media audience exactly what it wants is an ideal way to drive more follows and shares that can skyrocket your social media presence and the traffic from this source.
The benefits don’t stop with presence and traffic though. Following trends shows your visitors and customers that your brand is relevant, informed, and chooses to take an active role in society. Socially-minded businesses are increasingly favored and choosing to take a stance on prominent issues can greatly increase the trust and credibility of your business and blog.
Maintain a Flexible Content Plan and Schedule
The content plan for your blog should set a roadmap for several months in advance, but it’s important that you don’t make it too rigid. You need to allow some flexibility to ensure you can produce the most relevant content at any point in time.
You also need to constantly reassess what you’re doing based on the current trends. Evergreen content is great and it should form a significant part of your content plan, but you also need to keep track of new trends and choose the topics of your more timely pieces based on what people are interested in at that point in time.
Leave adequate time and space in your plan to change direction at the last minute if needed. Doing so will also help you create content that is more likely to go viral and provide a huge burst of traffic that can be turned into repeat visitors to grow the most devoted and engaged portion of your audience.
Research Your Audience
Invest in your audience and it will help you continue to grow. Your return visitors are the most valuable because they already have an interest and trust in your brand. Research into their interests and needs is one of the easiest ways to keep them hooked and continue to provide a valuable service that builds your brand authority.
There are many ways to analyze your audience on a general level, including tools like Google Analytics. You can also take a deeper look using surveys, polls, and feedback forms that give a unique insight into what your loyal customers think about your blog and online presence. Learning more about your audience helps to better serve their needs. It also helps you plan content that will continue to appeal to them.
Conclusion
A blog is a powerful tool for any business that wants to succeed online. It can give you more traffic and act as a foundation to build a social media presence. The best way to make it a successful strategy, however, is to produce content that is appealing and timely. You will see your audience grow significantly if you choose to be on the cusp of trending topics.
