Yesterday I wrote about a tool for content marketers that’s build to predict how your content idea will perform. Today, I’ll talk about a way of validating content ideas that doesn’t require this tool.
It’s based on this post by Sujan Patel:
- Your idea isn’t original. Someone else had this idea before. That’s great news! Because you can now check out how their idea performed and use that to gauge how your idea will perform. Do a (broad) google search for your idea and look at the results that come up and that look like they’re similar to your idea.
- Analyze how the post performed using Buzzsumo or ahrefs Content Explorer. (Just put in the URL and see the results)
- Do outreach before you write the post. Then measure the responses you get. This way you’ll have a great way of gauging how interested other people are in your content before you actually write it.
- Survey your audience (website visitors, blog readers, email subscribers, customers) what content they want.
- Learn the basic principles of content that performs. Buzzsumo did an analysis of content that performs well. Here’s what they found:
* It inspired awe, laughter, or amusement in its audience.
* It appealed to its audience’s narcissistic side (think personality quizzes).
* It’s long-form.
* It’s presented in list form or as an infographic.
* It looks professional and trustworthy.
* It contains visuals.
Now, one thing that IS for sure is that there’s no way of predicting how successful your content will be. No content marketer can tell in advance. Just like no music producer can tell in advance how successful a song will be, no movie production company can tell in advance how much a movie will gross.
But you can build a process that allows you to better gauge the success of your content. That’s what you should aim for: continuous learning.