3 Bucket Approach to Consistently Profitable Content Ideas
The dreaded writer’s block. We have all been there. You stare at a blank content calendar and need thirty days worth of fresh ideas. However, not just any old idea will do. For the time and resource investment to pay off, they must be PROFITABLE content ideas.
What do you do?
While crying and browsing LinkedIn for new jobs is one option, we have a better idea. Use our three-bucket approach. It’s a form of brainstorming for ideas that uses content goals as your guide to ensure the ideas you do come up with will generate the results you need to grow.
Let’s leave the blank page behind and join the three-bucket approach together.
What Is the Three Bucket Approach to Content Ideas?
Whether creating new content or refreshing old content, you need a strategy for finding endless topic ideas that won’t waste your precious time or drain your resources without promising a return.
The three-bucket approach begins with the end. Before creating content that generates results, you need to define what results you want.
I recommend summarizing your desired results in three buckets or overarching ideas and goals. They will keep your marketing content focused on the end goal and ensure what you publish contributes to those profitable goals.
Here are three buckets that we use at Express Writers and works well for many similar brands:
- SEO & Brand Awareness: Create content that will appear in search engine results, generating traffic and getting our name out.
- Lead Generation & Nurturing: Create content encouraging web traffic to fill in forms, read multiple articles, and engage with content as they move through the sales journey.
- Sales: Create content that promotes products and services and drives sales.
While your buckets may look very different, SEO should still be a top priority, as over half of web traffic comes from organic search.
Can content fall into multiple buckets? Most definitely! For example, some content will be SEO cornerstones but also drive sales. The key is filling your website with content that falls into at least one bucket. Otherwise, you are creating content for content’s sake.
Connect Your Buckets to ROI Goals
Let’s not just leave your goals as buckets. If you want to turn your content into profits, you will want to define what success looks like.
Let’s start with the SEO bucket. For SEO to be successful, how much of a traffic increase do you want to see from organic search? Define that number and monitor how well your content performs to keep you on track.
Lead generation might refer to a target number of new leads you generate each month or a target engagement rate.
Sales will be an easier category to track as you can use unique tracking codes in your content to monitor how many of your readers click the link and purchase your product, sign up for your demo, or request a quote for your services.
Fill Your Buckets with Seed Keywords
Along with establishing goals, you also want to list seed keywords. At this point, don’t worry about search traffic and deep research. Your seed keywords are terms that define who you are as a company. They are very broad.
For Express Writers, our seed keywords would be terms like “Content marketing,” “Content writing,” and “SEO.” You don’t need to stick with just three, but you also don’t need to list over a dozen seed keywords. If you have too many seed keywords, consider finding a term that captures several keywords into one overarching idea.
To start, list three to five seed keywords. These might define your industry or cover your product categories. As you move forward in your three-bucket strategy and begin brainstorming, those seed keywords may change as you find better terms to describe your business and categorize your content.
How to Generate Content Ideas That Turn a Profit
Once you have those buckets defined and benchmarks established, it’s time to fill them out and overflow them with topics!
At this point, you will set those three buckets aside. We are just looking at brainstorming and jotting down as many topics as possible. Sorting them into buckets comes later. However, you will want to keep those seed keywords handy as they’ll provide a starting point.
Discover how to find blog content ideas with five tried-and-true methods.
1. Perform Keyword Research
If your goal is search engine ranking, this step is a must!
Keyword research not only finds topics for content but also identifies topics most searched among your audience.
Our favorite tool is SEMrush, but we and other marketers also use Ahrefs, Buzzsumo, and Moz.
It’s time to pull out those seed keywords again. They will be a starting point for your SEO. If you’re using SEMrush, you will type the first seed keyword into the search bar, such as searching “Content marketing.” From there, SEMrush will return a list of related terms.
At this point, you don’t need to be too picky about the terms you save. As long as they’re relevant, all those recommendations could become potential blog and web page topics. Add all the keywords relating to your topic into a list, which you will export into an Excel file and add to your master list of content ideas.
2. Use Google Search
Google offers three different ways to discover new topics for your website. The first step is to begin typing your seed keyword into Google search. Google will suggest searches based on what people commonly type after the seed keyword. These suggestions are constantly changing and usually reflect trending topics.
If you perform a search of your seed keyword, Google has two sections on the search results pages with follow-up search suggestions. The first is “People also ask.” This section is near the top of your page and includes long-tail keywords and questions that people often ask relating to your search. This is a goldmine of topic ideas. About 8% of people phrase their searches as a question, so there are many question keywords to pull from.
As a side note, if you choose topics from this section, write small snippet sections in your content in the form of summary paragraphs that quickly answer the question in the topic. That way, you increase your chances of not just ranking for that keyword but appearing in people’s “People also ask” section.
If you scroll down further, Google also has a section titled “Related searches.” These are similar terms and phrases, usually shorter than the previous section and often more competitive. However, they are another valuable source of topic ideas to add to your list.
3. Check out Industry Websites
To remain competitive, you need to know what the competition is doing. If you have tools like SEMrush, you can perform what’s known as a competitor gap analysis. This research strategy lists what topics your competition covers and which ones you cover so you can see if there are any topic ideas you haven’t written about yet that your competition has a monopoly in searches.
You can also visit your competition’s website and scroll through their resource library. These topics might inspire ideas for your list.
If you write on a topic your competition covers, remember not just to copy what they wrote. That won’t win you any quality traffic. You need to find a way to give the topic a unique twist. For instance, what is something you offer that your competition doesn’t? That might be the angle from which you approach the subject, allowing you to highlight your unique selling point while covering similar topics to help visitors distinguish you from the competition in search results.
Adding personal experience and authority are ways to help you stand out to Google and improve your search engine ranking.
4. Listen to Your Customers
Your customers may be your most valuable source of topics. They are, after all, the ones you are trying to reach.
By saving common questions customers ask, you are generating a list of topics you know your audience wants to learn about because they asked you directly about it.
For example, we receive many questions about SEO and creating SEO content, so we often cover SEO topics in our blog posts.
We can attract new visitors through these blog posts, and when customers have questions, we can link to those posts to help them understand their projects better.
5. Follow Local Communities
This one requires a little more time and effort but often leads to the most unique topics. Following groups and communities in your industry helps you keep the pulse of the industry.
Reddit is a popular source of information. If you follow several industry threads, you will see an endless stream of questions directly from people also interested in the industry. You can answer those questions through blog posts and share those answers directly on Reddit to generate interest in your blog.
On social media, you can follow industry hashtags to see what conversations people are having around the industry. You will especially want to follow any industry leaders. For example, an SEO agency would follow Google closely to be one of the first to write topics on any new Google updates and changes, grabbing top spots in search results.
How to Organize Content Ideas into Buckets
If you went through those five strategies for generating blog ideas, you should now have a long list of blog topics. While you could start at the top and dive in, we don’t recommend that. Not all topics you have on the list will generate the desired results. Without results, the time and money you spend researching and writing on those topics will be a waste.
We highly suggest taking this last step and sorting those topics by buckets. Use these three tips to help you decide which content marketing ideas are keepers.
Determine the Keyword’s Relevancy
Be sure to go back through your list of potential topics and review the keywords. Delete any keywords that don’t apply to your brand.
Remember, it doesn’t matter how much traffic that keyword brings in. If your brand isn’t relevant to the audience, they will leave. That will increase your bounce rate and can hurt your search engine ranking. Instead, focus on topics you can answer with authority.
Sort into the Keyword Buckets
You will now sort your list of keywords by their bucket. This step is crucial for making sure your brainstorming is profitable. If you have interesting topics that don’t match your goals, it’s time to say goodbye to them. Otherwise, it will just waste your resources.
Review the Keyword Data
Now that you have a much shorter list of topic ideas, you can begin performing keyword research on those terms, primarily to satisfy your SEO traffic goals.
As you perform keyword research, you have two primary objectives:
- Determining the traffic potential
- Determining the competitiveness
Any topics you select with high traffic should be a priority on your website and blog. Those keywords are most likely to help you reach your traffic goals. You know your traffic potential by looking at a keyword search volume. This is the number of searches for that keyword that occur each month.
While that number alone can be a good indicator of a keyword’s value, other factors should be considered. Most keywords will also show a chart of how the keyword fluctuates over time.
For example, searches for information on an eclipse will skyrocket during eclipse years but won’t hold the same steady traffic at other times. Other keywords are evergreen topics that will bring in consistent traffic for years.
Image from SEMrush
You should also consider that not all monthly searches equate to monthly visitors. There’s a chance you might not even see half that number land on your page, especially if it falls further back in Google search results pages. The first page results tend to capture 99% of the clicks.
That’s why the second factor is essential: a keyword’s competitiveness. Keywords with low competition are easier to rank high for. For example, a keyword might only see 100 monthly searches but has very little competition. On the other hand, a popular keyword has 10,000 monthly searches but it is also very competitive. Targeting that easier keyword, landing on the first page, and attracting all 100 monthly visitors is far more valuable than trying for the 10k keyword and losing out on all the visitors because you land ten pages deep in the search results.
You will most likely notice that those long-tail keyword topics, like what you found in Google search, are far more likely to land you a top spot in Google. Those will be the topics you will pour the most energy into and prioritize on your content calendar.
Fight the Topic Burnout with a Three Bucket Approach
Far too many websites have fallen into the trap of creating content without purpose. If you wield your content well, your website is a huge opportunity to attract, retain, and convert customers. It takes a little research and vital goal-setting to get your content on track to generate profits.
Our content strategists are ready if you need help creating a profitable strategy. Our team of researchers and strategists is ready to find new, engaging topics and align them with your goals.
Contact us to begin your next order of profitable, goal-oriented content.
