Quick Info:
| Why care? | Give yourself a never-ending well of content ideas that actually resonate with what your audience is looking for. |
| Cost: | FREE |
| Who should do this: | All Businesses |
| Platform: | answerthepublic.com |
| How? | Read on… |
“What the heck do I talk about?”
Ever catch yourself asking this question when you’re trying to come up with what to post, blog about, or put in your emails?
It’s a common condition.
But instead of giving into writer’s block, I’ve got a super effective solution for creating a limitless bank of ideas that you’ll be able to pull from for content that your audience actually wants to consume!
How do I know what my audience wants to hear?
It all boils down to understanding who our ideal audience is, what makes them tick, and what makes them buy.
Without a super solid understanding of this, you will forever be throwing spaghetti against the wall and praying that it sticks. (It’s an exhausting way to run a business.)
So what can we do to make this piece easier? Well, there are a lot of avenues to explore, but the one we are going to focus on today involves using a free tool called Answer The Public.
What is Answer the Public?
Answer the Public is an online tool that allows you to research trends, search keywords, and see what people are searching for in relation to your business. It gives you the exact keywords people are using when they are describing what you do, and what kinds of questions they have.
It’s an incredible tool for gaining valuable insights about your ideal audience, and uncovering a goldmine of marketing insights.
And the best news: There’s a Free option.
How does it work?
All you have to do is insert a keyword, topic or product into their search bar, and then Answer the Public returns with every search term that uses that keyword across Google, Bing, YouTube, and more.
Here’s what was returned when I searched for Handmade Jewelry:
Then, they organize the results by frequency and the helping verbs used in the query (how, what, who, when, etc.), providing a detailed diagram that’s easy to comb through and filter down. The questions with the darkest coloured dots get the most queries, the lightest get the least.
When testing your own keywords, start very specific and work your way into broader categories. You can also try thinking about it from the perspective of your customer. If you were searching for your offering, what words would you use to search for it?
Play around and try multiple searches. The free tier lets you perform 3 searches per day without upgrading.
What do you do with the information from Answer the Public?
From the data it gives you, I like to pull out the queries that make sense for my business. For example, the search for Handmade Jewelry gave me 75 results, and these were the ones that resonated most:
- why handmade jewelry is better
- benefits of handmade jewelry
- how to make handmade jewelry at home
- how to price handmade jewelry
- what handmade jewelry sells best
- why buy handmade jewelry
- handmade jewelry meaning
- how to make handmade jewelry look professional
When I look at the results that get returned, I ask myself if I could answer this question from my own perspective.
So instead of asking why handmade jewelry is better? I could write about why MY handmade jewelry is better than mass-produced jewelry.
Instead of what handmade jewelry sells best? I identify that my audience wants to know: What are the trends in jewelry this season? What’s most popular?
I can turn it into something that resonates with me and my customers.
Taking it one step further:
Now that I have my list of questions from Answer the Public, I’m going to google each one of these statements (from a new incognito window) and look at the first 3 articles that come up to see what is being discussed.
I’m doing this because I want to get a sense of what content is already ranking the highest on Google for these search queries.
[Pro tip: be sure not to click on listings that are “sponsored” because that will skew your results. Those pages are at the top of the list because someone is paying to have them there.]
Then I’m going to sit and write my own thoughts around this question in my own voice with my own take on it.
This content now can be turned into a blog post for your website (which will be indexed and crawled by Google), you can use it in an email for your mailing list to provide some additional value to the email. AND you can break up the information to create multiple social media posts.
Today’s task
✅ Head over to Answer The Public and try doing your first search. Look through the list of returned queries and choose 1-3 that resonate with you. Then google those queries in an incognito window to see what people are really talking about surrounding your offerings.
Jot down some of the ideas that spark as you’re doing the research. I bet within 10 minutes you’ll have several to choose from.
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