HOW I FIND PROVEN

BLOG POST TOPICS

OVER THE SHOULDER

TRANSC R I P T I O N

How I Find Proven Blog Post Topics

Hey, what’s up everybody, Brian Dean here.

And in this video I’m going to show you some ways that I’ve been using lately to find blog post ideas.

So whether it’s for your ridiculously long list or other content formats and blog posts, templates that
we’re going to talk about later in the course, how do you come up with topics?

And fortunately, in my experience anyway, this process has become a lot easier over the last couple
of years because of a handful of tools.

So I’m going to show you the tools that I’m using and how I’m using them and how I’m getting the most
out of them to find topics.

So the first is Ahrefs, and specifically they’re a feature called top pages.

So what I used to do with Ahrefs is go to the keyword explorer or like most keyword tools and I type
something and like SEO or link building and kind of see what it suggests.

But I ended up coming across the same topics over and over again and I realized that a lot of my
competitors were also going after these same topics because we’re all using the same tools.

And we’re all using the same seed keywords.

So this top pages report is really cool because what you can do is put a competitor into the tool and
it shows you their top pages in terms of traffic, not just organic traffic, just traffic in general.

And this is important because if the site is similar to yours in terms of reach and authority and all that
stuff. Subscriber, email subscribers, then you have a good chance of also getting a lot of traffic from this
same topic if they did.

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So for example with CoSchedule, these are topics that I probably wouldn’t have thought of and
I wouldn’t have found in a tool like “how to write a press release”. It’s not super related to SEO, but
actually this is a post I’m going to write because I found this through this exact strategy I’m going
to show you, but it’s close enough and I do have some experience with this so I know I can write
something that’s really good about that topic.

So you can look at the page URL, go to each post and read it. But I find the top keyword just kind of tells
you what topic it is like a marketing plan template. Best time to send an email, color psychology,
marketing blog ideas, case studies, white papers, how to promote your blog, social media.

I mean this is just like a treasure trove of topics. And if your site, like I said, even if your site is smaller
it doesn’t really matter, but I’m just saying if it’s around the same size, you know you have a good
chance of also doing well with that topic.

Either way it can at least help you brainstorm and it takes approximately two seconds to get all this
data, which is really helpful.

Another tool I’ve been checking out a lot lately is called Question DB and basically what this tool does
is you put in a keyword and it scrapes Reddit for questions that people have around that particular
keyword.

So when I put it in “link building”, you get a ton of different suggestions here. Now a lot of them
are probably not relevant, but I find a lot of them are and they’re really interesting questions that
I might not have thought of.

Here’s great example: “What is the best way to scale link building efforts?”. This is a great blog post
topic because if someone’s asking on Reddit, they probably searched in Google and didn’t find anything
good or they looked on social media or they read their favorite blogs and didn’t find it there.

These people looked around, and this would be a great topic, like “How do you scale link building?”,
it’s one thing to do link building, but how do you scale? Or how about, where was it, oh, “How do I find
clients for link building?”. Another good one. A lot of our customers are agency owners, so they’re, have
a link building service and they want to find clients and it’s free.

This is an awesome source and then if you want to learn more you can click on the source and see
what people asked and answered and more details about it.

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Another tool I’ve been checking out is a little bit wonky. It doesn’t work 100% of the time.

It’s called a Wonder Search and what it is, is you put in a keyword and it goes to Google and scrapes
different keywords that people have under the people also searched for box.

And what’s nice about this is that it doesn’t just give you, variations of paleo diet or whatever you put
in.

So a lot of keyword tools you put in “Paleo diet” and it’s like Paleo diet recipes, Paleo diet meal plans,
Paleo diet breakfasts, like it’s all the same keywords that everyone’s seeing.

This gives you some interesting stuff like the Dash diet, Dukan diet, slow cooker, whole foods, Whole 30,
Zone diet. These are related, but they’re not going to show up in a keyword tool.

Another example I put in “content marketing”. These results weren’t that great like business market-
ing, sales, social media, but if you test this out enough, you can sometimes find some pretty cool a topic
ideas.

Let’s look at BuzzSumo.

You already know about this tool. I’m not going to get into what it does. Everyone knows it, but they
have a feature that I’ve been using a lot lately called “Topic Explorer”.

This is an, I got to hand it to them. This is an awesome feature.

So when you put in a topic in Topic Explorer, it doesn’t just give you related keywords. It gives you stuff
like The Primal Blueprint. I don’t know if you know what that is, but it’s a book about the Paleo diet
that’s really famous, but it’s not going to show up in a tool. This is a topic that’s related or a low carb
high fat is often associated with Paleo. MCT oils often associated with Paleo, but it doesn’t have the
word Paleo in it. You know what I mean?

Or grass-fed beef. This is something that a lot of people who are into Paleo, try to eat grass fed beef.
I don’t know how else you would find these topics is kind of like what Wonder Search I think is going
for, but BuzzSumo topic explore does it a lot better.

Going back to the traditional, what they call “The Content Analyzer”.

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You know this is what put BuzzSumo on the map.

You enter a keyboard and you see what’s done well. That’s still good. I’m not saying don’t use that, but
a feature I don’t see a lot of people use is a actually two features at once.

First putting a domain name in here. You don’t have to put a keyword. So if you’re in the personal
finance space you don’t have to put in like “savings accounts” and see what content related to that.
You can just put in like NerdWallet and see what content has done well for them.

And you want to combine that with something called the Evergreen Score. So what that is, it’s basically
if that content has been shared over a long period of time.

So you know this, I’m sure a lot of content comes out, it’s a flash in the pan, it gets a billion shares
and then it dies. You don’t usually want to create stuff like that. You want stuff that gets shared and
linked to over the course of months and years.

And that’s what the Evergreen Score was designed to do.

Filter out those flash in the pan type of post. So I put in [MAs 00:06:22] here and I saw it instead of
a sorting by total engagements, I saw it by Evergreen Score and you can see this stuff that still gets
linked to today. Some of it’s pretty old, like a lot of it’s from 2015 but people are still linking to it. People
are still sharing it, so it’s good. These are good topics for you to go after as well.

Last but not least, we have Google Analytics and this is all about doubling down on what works.

These tools are all great, but there’s, a lot of times there’s no needs to start from scratch or this can also
just help you know what to focus on if you’re trying to decide between topics.

So let’s look at the top 10 landing pages at Backlinko from last month. So what you’ll notice is that three
of the top four, so three that aren’t my homepage basically are all about YouTube.

So what does that tell me? Well, I should create a lot more stuff about YouTube that’s doing really well.

You know this, “How to get YouTube subscribers” page. I only published that, like I don’t know, maybe
four months ago and it’s already the number four post. It’ll probably fade over time and other ones will
come up and down or whatever.

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This fluctuates, but it gives you a good idea, YouTube is something that I should probably
create more content around because it’s doing well.

So double down on what works instead of branching out into something new.

Another thing I noticed is that tool related stuff tends to do well. So “SEO tools” is number six. This is
a huge list of tools. Google Keyword Planner is a tool. Keyword Research tools is obviously a list of tools.

So tool stuff is doing well. How can I create more tool stuff? Right? What other tools could I talk about?
Maybe a content marketing tools or PR tools or tools to increase your website speed. Blogging tools,
social media tools like this is a world of tools.

And instead of relying on BuzzSumo or Ahrefs to tell me what’s going to work, I already know what’s
working for me, which is the most important data you can have.

So these fancy tools and doodads and all that have their place. But at the end of the day, if you already
have a blog that has some traction, this is the best place to look, is your traffic over the course of the
last month or so, and seeing what brings in the most traffic and how you can double down on what
works.

So that’s it for this video. I hope you enjoyed it and I’ll see you in the next one.