Content creation refers to generating ideas, creating written or visual content around those ideas, and delivering that information to your audience in a blog, video, infographic, or other content format. This article will show you a tutorial with essential blog content creator guidelines.
Blogs can educate and inspire the public through the written word. When someone enters a search query into Google, the posts that appear are usually blog posts.
Tutorial and Guidelines For a Content Creator
Blog Content Creator Brainstorming
The first (and most common) method of coming up with what to blog about is good old brainstorming. Here’s what you do: sit down and write down any ideas. And voila! You’ve brainstormed.
However, this is limited and not the best practice for two reasons. You’re restricted to only things you can think of yourself (or as a team). You have no data to indicate whether it is a topic worth your time (or your audience’s)
Going this route is a good idea. It’s a great place to start. Combining brainstorming with mind-mapping software like Mindup, you can organize your ideas and connect them so that a structure makes content creation easier for your blog.
While you can certainly use this to create cornerstone content and branch articles from that, as well as organize general ideas and focus down into more specialized, problem-solving subjects, we suggest this as a simple starting point.
Auto-Search Guidelines
Once you have a series of general ideas mapped out and written down, it’s time to see how viable they are. And if people are looking for them. More specifically, it would help if you saw what people search for on the topic. That will tell you what problems your users need to solve, which is one of the primary goals and guidelines of a content creator.
One of the common ways to handle this is to search for the keywords to see what pops up. The better way to find what to blog about using autocomplete is to use the keyword as a question. That’s how users search these days, especially with the advent and proliferation of Siri, Alexa, and other voice assistants. You are using keywords along with who, what, where, when, why, and how, which will bring up a list of questions you can directly answer for your audience.
Beyond Google: Blog Content Creator To YouTube, Amazon, Facebook…
While Google is arguably the biggest search engine in the world, it’s not the only one with blog content creator guidelines for this tutorial. YouTube is gaining second place, and Amazon and Facebook are hot on its heels. They all use autocomplete to answer people’s questions and provide content suggestions. You’ll encounter people and topics you might never have thought of.
And because these are different platforms than Google itself (despite YT being owned by them), you’ll get vastly different results. You will get product ideas for topics people want to hear about most, people related to the field you can reach out to, and so on. Using my keywords and topics from various autocomplete fields is a way to stay in content topics for a long time.
And it’s not just these. Any site, store, network, etc., that uses autocomplete (Twitter, Instagram hashtags, for instance) can be mined this way.
SaaS For SEO
The real success is in SEO and SERP. More accurately, it’s in tools that let you determine the most active pages on your site, your competitor’s sites, and what keywords and search terms searchers use to arrive there.
SEMRush is one of the main essentials for a content creator to find out what to blog about. The service is premium; however, everyone can access a limited number of free daily queries. For many people just getting into SERP, keyword, and SEO analysis, these will be enough to get the hang of things, especially with other free-but-limited or trial services like MozPro.
Focus Keywords Content Creator Tutorial
Maybe the most accessible part of SEMRush and others are the Keyword Overview pages. While this might look like overwhelming data, it’s okay. Let’s break it down, step-by-step, to see how you can use this to figure out what to blog about.
- You start on your Dashboard upon logging in.
- Type in whatever keyword you want into the search bar at the top of the page.
- You then get taken to the Overview page. This is where the data may seem overwhelming, but it’s very easy to parse.
- Phrase Match Keywords will give you an idea of what people are searching for. Much like autocomplete above, you see hard numbers for the most popular variations. (Then you can take those keywords and mindmap or look for ways your content can be tailored around them.)
- Related Keywords shows, well, related keywords to the primary search. These might also be in the form of questions to gauge search intent. (You can then put it into the search bar and check their sub/related keywords.)
- The Organic Search Results shows you the actual, real-life, real-time search results. You can see your top competitors for SERPs in this area.
Once you’ve done this work, there are two other parts of SEMRush that you can use for topic generation: Topic Research and Organic Research.
Find Things To Write About
The Topic Research tab is one of our favorites. It’s a new(ish) SEMRush feature, but it does what this article is about. You put in a keyword, and it spits out tons of related keywords, search rankings, and competitor links. When looking at this screen, again, there’s a lot of information here. Let’s break this down, too, so you can see how useful this tool is.
Research Usage Tutorial For Content Creator
- Firstly, navigate to the Topic Research page in the left sidebar.
- When there, put in the keyword you want to research around.
- Secondly, dozens of results cards expand to give detailed data on those sub-results as they branch out and relate to the primary keyword.
- Subtopic volume indicates how many searches this phrase gets. Difficulty level gives you an idea of how difficult it is to rank (essentially, whether this is worth blogging about). The higher the number, the harder it will be to get eyes on your content. Topic Efficiency is a metric on whether or not this is a direct keyword to answer the users’ questions based on search intent.
- Headlines show the primary ranking results you’ll be competing against (which you can then use with the Organic Research tool discussed below).
- Finally, we now have Questions. These are actual questions that searchers type in and need answers to. You want to blog about content that answers these questions directly, efficiently, and using formats that Google likes to add as Rank 0 cards.
If you go through multiple of these cards in SEMRush, you will need help finding what to blog about. You might have to think about it, but when you’re given very specific questions about this topic, finding some that you can answer with your expertise and experience is guaranteed.
Search For Content Organically
The last tool in your SEMRush toolbox is the Organic Research tool under Domain Analytics in the left-hand sidebar. Using this tool, You can look at the performance, keyword traffic, etc., of any URL (including subfolders and long-tails). So you can check the performance of any single article of a blog post that you want to rank against or to springboard off of as a reply or compliment, for example.
Again, there’s a lot of information to dig into here, but if you’re searching for the simplest way to find out what to blog about based on your competitors’ performance, the three boxes that should concern you are these.
Content Creator Performance Tutorial
- Keywords are straightforward: this number indicates how many unique keywords lead to that site. (Basically, how deep is the well you’re diving into?)
- Top Organic Keywords is, again, straightforward. For that individual URL (not the overall site), these are the top keywords that land there. You can then see what content is on that page and compare it to the queries that bring in visitors. You can then take advantage of that by crafting complementary content that answers the same or similar questions for those keywords.
- Top Position Changes shows you the overall performance of this URL for various keywords regarding SERP. You will see how this post or page has moved up and down the search engine pages over time for individual keywords. Again, this will show you what content people want and what kind of content is best performing so that you can know what to blog about that will get the largest return for your time investment.
There’s a lot more involved in SEMRush and similar tools. But in terms of looking for what to blog about. This should get you started with enough know-how to scratch the surface. Generate some ideas to keep you moving forward as you experiment with the platform.
Write What You Would Read
Finally, we want to offer some simple, often underutilized advice. Blog about topics you want to read or need to read. The old cliche that our teachers would tell us. “If you have a question, someone else in the room does, too.” Applies here. We hope this tutorial article with essential guidelines for a blog content creator has helped you.