One of the best ways to get visibility and traffic to your blog posts is to write on topics that are popular and being shared on social media platforms. One reason why trending topics get more traction is that they’re relatively more valuable to the reader. Such content is more likely to get links and shares as well. Displaying domain expertise becomes a breeze when you follow and post about the latest stuff in your industry. It then gets you, followers and subscribers. Hacking industry trends is an essential part of any content marketing strategy.
Here are ten awesome ways in which you can find and write about trending topics:
Feedly is a great tool to research for trending content. The tool allows you to follow some of the top blogs in your niche with just one click. You can simply search for the relevant publications by choosing a category. Just subscribe to their feed and get all the latest content in your Feedly dashboard. Feedly is a freemium app available on desktop and mobile.
Another cool place to find trending content in your industry is Medium. Medium is a free-to-use content publishing platform. It’s a great community for finding some truly remarkable content pieces. You can use category search on the platform to search for some popular blog posts and pick those that you wish to write about. You can log in and create your free account and use Medium on your desktop or download its mobile app. You can follow individuals and categories on the platform. Once you do, you will see latest stories from them in your feed. Another section that’s worth checking out is “Popular on Medium”.
I think Quora is one of the best communities for finding trending content. Whenever I’m ideating a content piece, I would check out popular questions on Quora. The platform provides you the option to follow the relevant topics in your niche. Once you do so you’ll keep seeing the ‘Top Stories’ (questions) in your Quora newsfeed. You can also check out the ‘New Questions’ option to see the latest questions. The community is full of interesting questions to find inspiration for your next blog post.
Google Trends is another free tool with a host of interesting features. It helps you to do a comparative keyword research to find out which ones are being talked about the most.
The tool provides you with an option to analyze trends for web, images, videos as well as Google shopping.
You can also look for trending stories for a particular category and location.
There are many content pieces that get widely shared on social media channels. There is something unique and valuable about these pieces that make them unique. You must catch hold of these content pieces to know more about what’s doing well. Buzzsumo is one tool that will help you to find niche pieces which have the highest social shares. Type in a sample topic or keywords and you’ll get the URLs of all those pieces along with their respective number of shares on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn etc.
Some communities may not be as popular but definitely quite valuable. Reddit is one such community which can help you to find some fairly exciting content to help you ideate your next blog post. The community helps you view content based on its freshness and popularity. Look for the relevant subreddit for conversations related to your niche. You’ll find tabs like hot, rising, and new to look for trending topics.
Reddit is not a conventional place to do your content research but it’s certainly worth researching.
LinkedIn Pulse helps you to find some of the top stories and professional conversations on a daily basis. These stories are curated by editors of LinkedIn and include stuff that’s published on the platform and off it.
Check out the “What People are Talking About Now” section to get your dose of trending content.
Pocket is a must-have app for content marketers. Its core feature is to let you save your favourite articles and refer to them anytime, anywhere. The app recently came up with the “Explore” tab where you can type in any keywords in your niche and find content that people using Pocket are saving. That’s one great way to find popular content on Pocket. The other useful sections within the Pocket app include “Recommended, “Trending”, and “Must Reads”.
This another cool freemium tool to find trending content in your business vertical. You can simply use the search bar in the tool to look for a topic URL or author. EpicBeat has a unique search assist feature that gives you suggestions of keywords, authors, and websites based on your interests. The tool also provides you with an advanced search feature to make your search more accurate.
It lets you analyze the top content pieces and shares while it also gives you the list of those who have shared the pieces in the past week.
This is another cool web app to find the latest content in your industry. Just type in your keywords and find real-time content in your niche. It gives you the option to look for content pieces of all formats (Blogs, Microblogs, and Videos etc.) or just one of them. The tool gives you the option to search for exact key phrases so you can find results that are more relevant. You can use the tool to look for content that’s as recent as the last one day, 12 hours or an hour.
Besides the tools mentioned above, you can also look for trending blog topics in Google’s News Search feature. It’s a great place to find the very latest news and in your industry. Even Twitter for that matter is a great place to type in domain-specific hashtags and find the latest stories.
Make Your Content Stand Out
There are other things that you must keep in mind while posting on trending topics. Make sure you are trying to outdo some of the top trending content pieces. It will help you to get more shares and visibility for your blog post. Give an interesting twist to the topic by adding a point of view to your story. You can make it more valuable by adding examples and case studies that fit into the story.
Over To You
You must make use of the above tools white researching for blog topics. Trending stories will always fetch you more traffic for your blog and result in more leads and conversions. You must make use of trending topics to pitch for guest stories – the acceptance rate will be much higher and result in more backlinks and brand mentions.
I hope you found this piece helpful. Would love to learn from your experience. Please feel free to add your suggestions in the comments section below.