Pop quiz: what compliments your blogs, triggers your lead nurturing campaign, informs your audience, AND positions you as an authority in your space?

If you said content, you're right! With how essential content is to Inbound success, it's unfortunate that so many marketers struggle to come up with quality topics. 

If that sounds like you, don't despair. We've compiled a list of go-to resources for uncovering the subjects your audience cares about, and you'll have no problem writing about:

1. Popular Facebook posts

You use Facebook to market your website, right? If not, start today.

If you do, you have access to a treasure trove of free information about your audience's informational wants and interests.

Just log into your Facebook, and navigate to “View Insights” at the top of your business page. Once you're in the Insights interface, cruise over to the fifth tab, “Posts”.

Here, you can see the reach and engagement performance of your Facebook posts

Look for common themes and topics that earn higher engagement. Start brainstorming related topics you could address in blog posts and premium content.

2. Top Retweets

That's right, X / Twitter is good for more than selfies and #PointlessUpdates.

Consider setting up a stream in HootSuite (or your preferred social media manager) to track when your tweets are retweeted. Pay attention to big spikes, and create more content speaking to those popular topics.

3. Social Discussions

While you're in HootSuite, set up a stream to monitor your businesses' most important keywords. If you're local, you can even target it to your immediate geographical radius.

Note what's being said about your industry, and look for opportunities to address unique unanswered questions.

4. Most shared articles

If your blog has social buttons, keep an eye on which articles are getting the greatest overall reach through social sharing. Write related content.

Oh, and if you're not using social buttons, jump on that.

5. Highest traffic articles

OK, this ones so easy it's painful.

Open up your blogging component (we use ZOO and K2) and sort your articles by most hits. Do you see topics that are continually getting hits each time you blog about them? Great, write more of them.

Just remember to diversify and speak to related but not identical themes; nobody likes to read the same article in different words.

If you have a handful of short related blog posts that are popular, consider compiling all of the information into an eBook or guide.

6. Highest traffic content categories

Let's take that traffic analysis up to the next level. Log into your Google Analytics account, open up your site view, and navigate down to “Behavior” on the left column. Select “Site Content” and then “Content Drilldown”.

What you're looking at now are the most popular categories of your site. If you have great site structure, you'll even be able to navigate into categories of your blog and see which do better than others.

Focus your efforts in those categories, and create premium content along the same lines.

7. Frequently asked questions

Everybody has at least one question they have to answer several times a day.

Creating articles or premium content answering those questions is not only a great way to save yourself the time spent answering, it guarantees you have content out there that speaks to the informational wants of your community.

8. Public Discussions

Regardless of what you do, there's a huge chance people are talking about your industry in online discussion forums.

Consider networks like Quora or LinkedIn, which offer ample opportunities for individuals to ask questions and get answers from novice to expert individuals.

Conduct a LinkedIn search for relevant groups, and hop on Quora to look for topics associated with your business. Write quality articles or premium content answering "low hanging fruit" questions,  then respond to those questions with a link to the information you've put together.

9. Site search queries

What do you do when you can't find what you're looking for on a website? Try the site search!

You can see what people are searching for on your site by setting up a simple report in Google Analytics. Use this treasure trove of user intent knowledge to help build your strategy.

10. Persona traits

Don't get so caught up in assessing opportunities that you forget to consider the true heart of any effective strategy: your buyer personas' wants.

Buyer personas are fictional representations of our ideal customers, and their profiles include everything from preferred social networks to professional goals. Keeping these habits and desires in mind is imperative to the effective creating and promoting of your content.

Now, it's time to hop to it! Start looking around for high value, high opportunity content topics and you'll be surprised how many are hiding in plain sight.

Good luck!

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