A simple way to create helpful content

I call today’s idea the How To Create Insanely Helpful Content hack.

When it comes to helpful content marketing, the idea phase is more important than the promotion phase. Without a great idea, it’s hard to write great content, and bad content is not easy to promote. Fortunately, there are a number of free tools you can use to come up with better content ideas for your blog, podcast or YouTube channel. And good content leads to a better reputation, higher website traffic, and in the end, more conversions.

So, here’s my 3-steps to creating helpful content:

Pick a tool you love to work with for the idea generation stage. Personally, I love BuzzSumo, but there’s also Open Site Explorer and Quick Sprout. You simply type in a topic, and it will spit back links to content that has outperformed in terms of backlinks and social shares, filtered by date, country and word count.
Once you’ve picked your tool, spend time in its Help section getting to learn how to use it. Trust me, this will be time well invested upfront.
To form your own ideas, look for content that has done well in the past, and think about how you can make it better or put a different spin on it. It’s also important that you take the time to actually read the posts that have had high traffic or high social engagement in order to get ideas about how to structure your own content.

Pro-Tip: Make a game of this by setting up some measurement criteria. Create your first piece of helpful content using this tactic, measure it’s success (or lack of), then aim to beat it with your next piece. Then rinse and repeat.

That’s my 3-steps to creating insanely helpful content.

To help bring this low-cost marketing idea to life, here’s some additional resources:

BuzzSumo

Open Site Explorer

Quick Sprout

BuzzSumo result where I searched my favourite topic of Coffee.

As always, you’ll find more marketing inspiration in my popular marketing book The Boomerang Effect.

So, what have you got to lose?

WHYGTL