Audience pain points are important for one main reason: they represent what your audience cares about the most. Of course, you can create content on whatever topics come to mind, and you may even have a few hits here and there but without knowing exactly what problems your audience is having, you have no way of knowing which topics or types of content have the most potential to succeed.
By reaching out to your audience about what they struggle with the most and listening to them, you can unlock a plethora of information that’ll help you come up with topic ideas they’ll be interested in.
Turning audience pain points into blog posts
The purpose of this post is to find specific content ideas that’ll strike a chord with your audience and make them become more engaged with your blog.
One way to do this is by coming up with solutions for each pain point, watching how other bloggers handle each topic and discovering those that are most popularly searched.
Bringing solutions to your audience’s biggest pain points
One of the easiest and most effective ways to turn your audience pain points into topic ideas is to come up with solutions for them. Start by addressing the biggest issue pointed out by your audience in as many ways as you can.
Make use of your own knowledge and do as much research as you can on the issue, then write down all applicable solutions.
For example, if my niche is fitness, one of the common problems people face is knowing how to lose weight in a short period of time, say two weeks. This is a general problem with multiple solutions.
Make sure to write down all the steps included in each solution. How you approach and explain the solution in your content is solely up to you.
If a solution has enough potential in search engines, for instance a search volume of a thousand per month or more, consider creating an article of about 2500 words or more that covers everything related to the solution to give yourself a chance at ranking for that keyword somewhere along the line. This article should be promoted through every medium at your disposal
For example, how to lose weight fast, has multiple solutions that come in the form of dieting, exercises, fasting and calorie counting.
In the brainstorming stage, reaching the first solution, dieting, would include the following steps:
- Foods for weight loss
- Different types of diets
- Benefits of dieting
- Choosing the right diet for your body type
- How to stay motivated when dieting
- Creating a suitable meal time table
After the first point has been broken down into different blog post ideas, I can then scroll down the list and come up with topic ideas for each step in the solution, and repeat it all for every solution I came up with for the “how to lose weight fast” pain point.
Finding what works for your competitors
In order to ensure that your content is in alignment with what your audience is looking for, structuring your content marketing strategy around their pain points is the best thing to do. That being said, you should still do more research to ensure the topic ideas actually have some benefit.
One way to do this is to conduct a research on how other bloggers handled the topic and find out what worked and didn’t for them.
Best performing content list
You can also scan through their blogs using the pain points as key words. Google is the most effective way to do this. You can do this by entering site:domain.com “keyword” into Google Search.
Finding ideas through keyword research
This works in similar ways to the previous step except you’ll be using keyword research tools and seed keywords instead.
You might need to run a few searches to find the correct way to phrase certain keywords, such as “sky diving” as opposed to “diving in the skies.”
You’re not really looking for keywords here. You’re only searching for topics that have a substantial interest in search engines and are similar to your pain points.
After doing that, export whatever data you find, then come up with topic ideas for each keyword. Refer to the tool as many times as possible.
Brainstorming blog post ideas
I’m sure this goes without saying, but it’s still worth mentioning. You can also make use of the first section of this article by using the solutions and steps it takes to achieve them as references.
Even if you don’t think the idea would have much search value or popularity, don’t hesitate or be afraid to write it down.
Now that you’ve identified your pain points and have these four methods at your disposal, you have a perfect way to come up with a huge list of blog post ideas on topics you know your readers care about. Now, you simply need to figure out a way to add them to your content marketing strategy.
Now that you know how to turn audience pain points into blog post ideas, its time to know how to find your audience’s biggest pain points.