Come up with topic ideas and keywords to target

Where does my audience hang out online? (Certain blogs, social media platforms, forums, Facebook groups, etc.) What is their biggest gripe at work? (Maybe they hate their commute or their boss, or they’re bored, or they aren’t getting enough traffic to their website.) What sort of content or articles do they most enjoy reading? (Look at your Google analytics for your blog, if you have it. Which posts did the best? You can also use BuzzSumo to see what your competitor’s most shared articles are.)

There you have it –the secret is to find out the underlying motivations of your target readers, then helping them achieve those goals.

Once you have an idea of who you’re writing for, next up is:

Step 3: Come up with topic ideas and keywords to target.

Let’s start with keywords:

Keywords are the bread and butter to an effective blog content strategy. Without them, you’re going to be hard-pressed to rank well on search engines. Without ranking on search engines, you’ll have an even harder time getting a lot of consistent traffic.

Despite the overload of information from alleged “SEO experts”, keyword research and SEO (search engine optimization) isn’t all that difficult.

Let me break it down for you in three simple steps:

1. Find some keywords you want to rank for that have high search volume and low-ish competition. 2. Write mind-blowingly good blog content that includes your main keywords in the title, body, headers, and image alt text (don’t overdo it, though. 3-7 times in an article is plenty, depending on the length). 3. Work on getting backlinks to that article with your main keywords as the anchor text (i.e. if your main keyword is “marketing strategies”, you