Blogging isn’t writing what you did today. That’s a diary.
If you take that approach to blogging, and you don’t already have an existing and loyal audience that hangs on your every word, then your business blog is going to be a ghost town.
How do you fix this?
Write about the problems your target customers are actually searching for.
Say that you sell computer parts online. Chances are your customers are searching for things like:
- Why is my computer so slow?
- How to build a computer
- How to speed up a computer
If we plug those keywords into Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, we see that there are thousands of searches for each of them every single month.
But here’s the best part:
You can help people solve these problems while integrating products from your store in the content itself.
For example, a slow computer may come down to the RAM, or hard drive, or CPU. So help readers diagnose their problem and offer product solutions in the process.
Same goes for “how to build a computer.” Explain how to do it and recommend the specific components they need.
This concept works in almost every industry.
If you’re a realtor, then instead of blogging about the latest industry award that nobody cares about, write about real-world problems potential customers are searching for like:
- How to invest in real estate
- How to buy a house
- What credit score is needed to buy a house
All of these topics have the potential to attract a vast audience:
Not just any audience, either: these are people in the market for what you offer, who likely have deep pockets and a burning desire to own their own home.
But how do you find what your audience is searching for?
The first option is to guess. The second and better option is to use a tool like Ahrefs Keywords Explorer and search for some relevant seed keywords. For a realtor, these might be things like “buy a house,” “real estate,” etc.
From here, head to the “Questions” report to see the most popular questions people are asking.
It’s then just a case of picking out the best keywords for your business, analyzing keyword difficulty, and creating optimized content.
If you can do this and rank, you’ll get free, consistent, and passive traffic from Google month after month.
YouTube is the world’s 3rd biggest search engine, and it’s yet another place where people are searching for solutions to their problems.
For example, there are 17,000 monthly searches worldwide for “makeup for beginners”:
Now, I’m no expert, but I’m guessing that it’s easier to pull off this look when you use the right makeup and brushes.
So if you were a retailer of makeup and makeup accessories or even just an affiliate, then you could easily create a video about this topic and recommend a few products in the process.
This is what popular vloggers like Danielle Mansutti do.
Danielle’s video ranks #1 on YouTube for “makeup for beginners,” and her video has racked up over 2.6 million views to date:
Throughout the video, she recommends the best products to use and tells you where to buy them in the video description:
Furthermore, because Google now shows video results for a lot of searches, her video also ranks in Google for related terms.
In fact, that video gets an extra 2,900 visits per month from Google alone:
Back to business: To find relevant topics that people are searching for on YouTube, go to Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, switch the search engine to YouTube, and search for a broad keyword in your industry.
If you sell iPhone cases, then this would be something like “iPhone” or “iPhone X”:
From here, check the “Questions” report to see what questions people are asking about this topic. Right away, you’ll see some great topic ideas like “how to unlock iPhone 6” and “how to replace iPhone 6 screen”:
The latter is a particularly good keyword to target as an iPhone case seller because viewers will likely want to take more care of their phone once fixed—in which case, they may want to buy a case.
For best results with this strategy, make your videos are genuinely helpful and valuable, keep the fluff to a minimum and refrain from being overly promotional.
Doing this has helped us to grow our YouTube channel to over 150,000 monthly views…