topic mapping

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. SEMrush 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, … Read more