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If you’ve ever taken on freelance blogging work, chances are good you were tasked with coming up with blog post ideas for your clients. If you specialize in a niche (rather than blogging as a project type), this might be easy. You’re intimately familiar with the subject matter. But what about working with clients in niches or industries that are newer to you? Today I’ll share a fun tool you can use to come up with blog post ideas around any topic. Knowing What Readers WantAny blog content you write for clients has to be tailored to their readers. That means understanding what their target readers want to know. What questions do they have that could be answered on your client’s blog? To find out, you can turn to keyword research — literally helping you identify what people are searching for and want to know more about. You can do this using more traditional tools like Google’s keyword planner. Or you can use this cool keyword research and data visualization tool: AnswerThePublic.com. How Answer the Public WorksWhen you visit the site, you’ll see a search box. Enter a term related to your client’s business there. Then hit the “Get Questions” button. What you’ll receive are several different keyword maps that can help you brainstorm blog post ideas to run by your client. For example, let’s say you’re managing the blog for an estate planning attorney. You could enter “estate planning” in the search box and your first keyword map will give you a series of common questions around that topic. It will look something like this: |
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Sometimes the questions themselves would make for great blog post ideas. For example:
Others may simply serve as inspiration. After this keyword map, you’ll find two more: First is the preposition-based keyword map which has suggestions like:
Any of these would also make worthwhile blog posts. After that, you’ll find a comparative keyword map. In this case, it features ideas like:
Again, you could run with those ideas or let them inspire narrower blog post topics. Then you’ll see all the topics in a segmented alphabetical list if the maps aren’t your thing. And you can download any map, or download the data in a CSV file. Finally, you’ll find one more map — one giving you suggested keyword phrases like:
These serve as your next step. Enter any of them into the search box to conduct a new search, and you’ll get even more detailed suggestions. The free version is likely all you’ll need. But it’s usage is throttled, so you can only conduct limited searchs free each day. Choose wisely. After you’ve put together a list of blog post ideas using Answer The Public, you can then run those ideas through the Google Keyword Planner linked above to identify those with the highest search volume. How This Can Help You as a Freelance WriterYou might wonder why an experienced freelance blogger like you would need a tool like this to mass-generate post ideas. If you only write an occasional post for each client, you might not. But what this does is:
I hope you enjoy playing with this tool as much as I do. See you Monday on the new blog at FreelanceWritingPros.com! Jenn |