shareable content

You’ve listened to the data. You’re consistently writing great long-form content that’s supposed to be generating plenty of shares and traffic for your blog. But, for some reason, it’s not working. Over and over again, you’re finding that a large majority of your content generates minimal levels of social engagement. You’re not alone. After taking a look at over 1 million blog posts, the team at OkDork found that 89% of posts have less than 100 social shares. Yikes. (Remember the post I wrote a while back: social shares are not your best ROI tracker?) But why is this? And what can you do to make sure that more than 1 out of 10 of your posts generate 100+ social shares? It all starts with choosing the right blog topics. Marketing expert Brandon Gaille created a useful infographic that outlines the hottest blog topics by popularity and revenue. According to his research, the top 10 blog topics include: As we move through this article, we’re going to use data and examples to show you which of the above topics can help you get the most shares and reads. We’ll also take a look at some other topics that are proven to perform well. Let’s get started. The Hottest Blog Topics Today: 5 Topics That Attract Readers & Shares 1. Saving Time People love to read and hear about what they can do to save time. In fact, they love to hear about it so much that they’re willing to spend a whole lot of their time reading and sharing content on the topic. Take a look at BuzzSumo statistics for these two productivity based posts: While both articles are fairly basic, the headline promises to readers that they’ll be able to save “tons” or “loads” of time. And, since they’re able to deliver on that promise, they both generated over 450k social shares. Writer and speaker Laura Vanderkam leveraged the power of talking about time management in her TED talk, How to Gain Control of Your Free Time. The talk has generated almost 4 million views to date and has proved vital in helping Vanderkam grow her personal brand. People naturally want to be better at time management. If you’re able to find ways to help your audience become more productive, they’ll reward you with shares and reads. 2. Health & Fitness Just like time management, health and fitness shines in topic popularity because it’s something that everyone wants to be better at. When BuzzSumo created a list of the most viral content of 2016, three of the top 10 articles were in the health and fitness niche. This article, about healthy and portable high-protein snacks, generated over 2 million social shares. And this article, about the top 10 ab exercises, generated almost 2 million as well. Now, depending on your audience, talking about health may seem like an odd thing to do. For example, if you’re a financial consultant, writing about ab exercises isn’t going to yield the results that it will for a blog that already writes in that niche. What you can do, however, is generate health topics that are relevant to your target audience and the unique situations that they face in their daily life. In the financial consultant example, you could write an article for business owners about how consistent exercise contributes to increased productivity (which, in turn, contributes to wealth). And, if you can pull it off, there is clear evidence that people will share and read your content. 3. Money More time, better health, and more money. Hopefully you’re catching on to the trend. The blog topics that perform best are the things that people want most in life. The Penny Hoarder has generated tons of loyal fans by providing readers with advice on how to make and save money. Here’s an example of one of their most successful money based articles: The article isn’t overly in-depth, but it does provide brief information for readers on how to earn extra money. And that’s not the only article they’ve written on the topic that has yielded great results. Over the last 12 months, three of the top four articles around the term ‘making money’ were created by their writers. With social shares above 173k for each article, it’s safe to say that they have a pretty firm handle on what their readers want to hear about. It’s also safe to say that writing about money, and how to save and/or make it, is a great way to generate the type of interest that produces social shares and visitors. 4. Happiness and Getting What You Want Out of Life Want to be happy? Of course you do. And so does everyone else. That’s why content related to happiness, and achieving it, gets shared so much. Take a look at these six pieces of happiness-related content that have all been shared over 95,000 times to date. As we look at these BuzzSumo results, it’s also important to note the platforms where the content is being shared. The written articles about happiness were most likely to receive a majority of their shares on Facebook. The content that features quotes, however, received over 95k shares on Pinterest but only 88 on Facebook. As we move along in this article, we’ll dive deeper into the importance of considering the platform when deciding on a blog topic. 5. Travel Travel content doesn’t have the share power that the above topics do, but it can certainly produce solid numbers when the topic is implemented into your content strategy correctly. Not everyone is an adventurer. But as science tells us, there are quite a few people who are born to travel. And there are a lot of content creators generating massive shares from taking advantage of this. Take these articles for example: As you can see, Facebook is where the majority of shares are being seen for this topic. Pinterest is another platform where travel content works well, especially when it’s posted alongside … Read more