The final reason why having a backlog of content is so important is because content is often one of the first things that falls by the wayside for small businesses. By having a backlog of content, you’re ensuring that your customers will continuously get valuable content delivered to them in a timely manner, on a consistent schedule.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\nThis makes sure that your customers or your prospective customers are always hearing from you, which will help grow your sales opportunities. What I’ll typically do is I’ll use some form of a Google sheet with\u00a0 Zapier integration or with some combination of Trello. And what this allows me to do is it allows me to stay organized in terms of all the potential ideas that we could tackle in the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So now that we understand the three reasons why having a content backlogged is so important, let’s dig into the three methods for how to find content ideas for free.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Method 1: People often ask: Answerthepublic.com and keywordsheeter.com<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The first method for finding content ideas for free is to use one of two resources, either Answerthepublic.com\u00a0or keywordsheeter.com. What these sites do is they break down intent based search queries. And what I mean by that is these are the questions that people are frequently asking in your respective space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let’s first dig into Answerthepublic.com. Aside from the super creepy dude that is always staring at you as you put in your search term, it’s a super valuable site and their free account will give you a few free searches every single day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So what I’m going to do here is I’m going to put in a search term and I’m going to see what similarly related search queries often are associated with the search term that I’m looking for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Typically when I go through the results, I like to look at things in the list view. What this will do is it’ll provide me with a breakdown based off of the alphabet. And this allows me to quickly sift through the different search results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As I’m sifting through these results, what I’m trying to think about is where topics potentially overlap with one another. How can I connect three or four of these topics into one central theme? If the idea of a hub and spoke model in which you have a core topic idea, which might be your niche, and then you have five or six spokes or satellites that essentially relate to your core topic, but essentially are more like sub-headers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So when you can put these sorts of related topics together, it can create a really evergreen piece of content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The second site that you can use is keywordsheeter.com. What this does is it’ll essentially use all the autocomplete responses for the search term that you are looking for and it’ll keep on skewing them out until pretty much infinity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And so I’ve personally rarely found that it runs out of search terms. One of the harder things with this sort of, of idea is that you do have to filter through some bad results when you are going through these respective results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So as you can see on the screen here, what I’m doing is I am putting in a search term into keywordsheeter.com and then it is essentially just spitting out all the rest of related keywords to that particular term.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The reason why this method is so much better than Google autocomplete is because this method is way more comprehensive. If you use the old Google autocomplete method, you’re going to have to go through every single Google search result for your search phrase A, your search phrase B C, D, and so on. This saves a ton of time for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Method 2: People also ask \/ Quora \/ Reddit<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The second method for finding content ideas super fast is to use a combination of People Also Ask, Quora and Reddit. Now that we know what people are asking us, what we want to do is you want to dig into the layers of the onion and figure out what the nuances to that overarching question is so that we can create the best possible resource on the planet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, what I’m going to do here is I’m going to look at an example in which I searched the phrase, acro yoga, into Answerthepublic. And what I’m going to dig into is I’m going to see what sort of things come up in People Also Ask from the Google results. And when I look for one of the long tail questions that came out of Answerthepublic, such as how to learn acro yoga. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is what I see on my search results page. I see things that go along the lines of, how can I practice acro yoga alone? What is the point of acro yoga? Is accurate yoga intimate? What is two person yoga called and so on. So you can see that these are similarly related questions to the core phrase of how to learn acro yoga that somebody might have if they were curious about acro yoga.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One of the super cool things you can do with People Also Ask is the extension results pretty much are endless. And so what you can do is you can simply expand and collapse one of the results and it’ll keep spinning up new results below that. So this is a great way for you to get a quick pulse check on some of the commonly asked questions that are related to the first search term that you were looking up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then from there, what I personally use is I like to use the free Scraper Chrome extension to scrape all of these questions and then put them into a spreadsheet. I’m going to take out the diff, which will then allow me to pull all of the core questions that are being asked in my People Also Asked section.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is a great way for you to save a ton of time with your keyword research and overall SEO prep. From here, what I’m going to do is I’m going to put all of these People Also Ask queries into a spreadsheet, and then I’m going to do a quick search on Quora as well as Reddit for the same phrase that I started with how to start learning acro yoga, or how to learn acro yoga, and see what results come up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In order to do this, you’re going to want to put in the search parameter of site, colon, quora.com or reddit.com. And then you’re going to want to use one of the who, what, where, when, why, and how questions along with your key keyword.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So in this case, I might start with something along the lines of when acro yoga or how acro yoga and see what the results come out with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So let’s go ahead and do that. So as I search site: quora.com how acro yoga, you can see some of the results that come up. And these are commonly asked questions that are being asked by real people on these social websites. So you can see here in the results, we have things such as, how to learn acro yoga, what is accurate yoga, what are some cool acro yoga poses. So as you can tell, there are more and more. The questions that are being asked by people that get views because on Quora, you can actually see how many views each question has. And then from there, you can start to prioritize your different content ideas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After you’ve gone through all of the People Also Ask, Quora and Reddit results, you can start to group things together and see what could fall into an evergreen piece of content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The purpose of the second method is to dig even deeper to what you found in the first method and validate what you found in the first method as something that would be valuable to your audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If these search engine tips are making sense to hit the like button or say “I’m following” in the comments below so that I know that you’re tracking with me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n