A blog is only as effective as its posts. In this Whiteboard Friday, Rand offers six paths you can take to make sure your posts resonate with your audiences.

Search the topic you want to write about.
You may find you need to broaden or narrow your search to get the results you need. For instance, when following this process for this article, I might broaden the topic by searching for “why content marketing fails.”

Open each of the articles ranking on the first page of the search results.
This assumes all the results are relevant. If they aren’t, skip the irrelevant ones and move on to the second results page. Alternatively, change your search phrase.

Read each article carefully.
Write down their best points.

Write an article that incorporates all these elements.
And more.

1. HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator

2. BuzzSumo

3. Alltop

4. UberSuggest

5. Google Trends

6. Portent’s Content Idea Generator

7. Content Row’s Link Bait Title Generator

Blog aggregators like Alltop, BizSugar, and Blog Engage mine useful content and products that are relevant to your field.

Consumer Barometer with Google is a tool that helps understand how people use the Internet across the world. 

Quora is another valuable community where real people ask real questions and discuss the content they’re interested in and issues they care about. Other valuable communities for trend monitoring include:

• Yahoo Answers
• Reddit
• Ask MetaFilter

Use Ahrefs to monitor the activities and content of competitors:

an amazing content analysis tool that allows you to view what is performing best based on keywords. You can easily track the most popular content of any domain and search for interesting trends.

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