Episode 39: A free online tool to help combat content blocks and brainstorm content ideas
If you find yourself going through a content block, then you will find today’s quick tip episode super useful. Fiona shares how she uses AnswerThePublic as a keyword researching tool that enables anyone to find out what sorts of questions and ideas and content your audience might be searching for online related to your product or services. Listen now and learn how you can use it for your content planning so that you have something valuable to talk about on your next social media post, blog or campaign!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction [00:54]
Preparing Content [1:29]
AnswerThePublic [3:30]
How Does It Work? [4:29]
Example [5:53]
Conclusion [9:12]
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Episode transcript:
Hello and welcome to episode 39 of the My Daily Business Coach podcast. I'm Fiona Killackey and I'm a business coach working with a load of amazing small business owners and entrepreneurs all over the world. Now, if you're new here, thank you so much for tuning in. If you find this useful, this podcast in any way, you might be interested in my weekly email. I've been sending this out every single Sunday for years now, and it's another way to get really good free business advice and tips on the regular. So you can subscribe to that over mydailybusinesscoach.com/subscribe.
Okay, so let's get into today's tip episode. And a tip episode is really where I share a tip tool or tactic in about five minutes or less, that can really help you in your small business journey. Now today's tip episode is actually about a tool and it's a really great one, especially when it comes to brainstorming your marketing campaigns, content, or even coming up with ideas for a collaboration or a partnership.
Now, I come from a background that is heavy, heavy, heavy in content. I have worked full time as a magazine editor. I've worked as a book editor. I've worked as a journalist. I had a newspaper column for a while in one of the top newspapers in Australia. I've also written for so many online and print publications around the world, including Monocle, Nylon, Fairfax, Cool Hunting, The Design Files, and so, so, so many more. And the reason that I'm pointing that out is even with all of that, I can still find myself in a content block. And I know that for many small business owners, content can feel like this beast - this always hungry, always open kind of beast that you need to feed. Now today, I'm not getting really stuck into content strategy at all. I'm just telling you a quick tip tool, a tactic, but it definitely think that when it comes to your content, you want to have an objective behind it.
You shouldn't just be out there, spruiking more stuff or making noise for the sake of making noise. You should always try and have an objective behind your content. So where are you leading with this content? Is it to an email list? Is it to your website? Is it to your physical store? Is it to an event? You know, what is your content trying to do? And then how are you going to measure that? Anyway, that was a bit of a side note before I get into today's episode. And I really hope that the tool that I'm going to share with you helps alleviate some of the creative block that we can definitely find ourselves in when it comes to content as a small business owner. So let's get stuck in today's tool.
So the tool that I wanted to share with you is a website, a platform, whatever you want to call it. And it's called AnswerThePublic. And you can find that just to answerthepublic.com I'll of course, add this to the show notes as well, in case you're listening to this on the go and at its simplest AnswerThePublic. It's basically a keyword researching tool, an SEO tool if you like that enables you to find out what sorts of questions and ideas and content your audience might be searching for online when it comes to whatever it is that you sell. It can also be really great at giving you just so many ideas for content creation, for things like a blog or a newsletter or a content series, whether that's, you know, on YouTube or an audio series, like a podcast, it's just a really clever, quick tool that if nothing else can just break you out of the kind of funk that you can get into, when you're like, Oh God, what are we going to talk about? How are we going to connect with that audience through our content?
So how does AnswerThePublic work? Well, I should preface this with, I started using this about three years ago, and I have to say that back then it gave you a lot more than it does now. You know, it's definitely upped with the whole, you have to pay for what used to be free type of thing, but it definitely still provides quite a bit of value for free. And of course, if you start using this and you're like, "I absolutely love this. This is fantastic. We absolutely are using this on the daily ." Then of course you might want to start paying and get even more features, but definitely you can go with the free version of AnswerThePublic and it'll still do the job that I'm about to talk through.
So the way that it works is you simply input a keyword or maybe two into the initial search box, and then you wait for it to do a crawl of the internet and what it all then show you is a wheel of all of these possible questions and the top search results for whatever the keywords are that you put into the system. So it's kind of hard to describe it on audio, but if you can imagine you put in the search term, you click the box and suddenly you get this wheel of questions. And if you click on any of those questions, you'll find the top ranking search result for that question. And of course it's dynamic. So if you go on Tuesday and you put it in, and then you go back a week later, it may be different things. When you click on the same question, you might have different ranking results based on new content coming onto the internet.
So for example, let's say that you sell tea online, specifically, you sell green tea online and you're stuck for content ideas. And so you go over to AnswerThePublic and you put in green tea into the search box. What will then happen is you'll be presented with so many questions that are being asked right now by real people online about green tea.
So for example, I'm literally doing this as I record this podcast episode. And the questions that are coming up that I'm finding are things like,
How is green tea made?
Does green tea help in weight loss?
How does green tea taste?
How does green tea work?
What is green tea good for?
Which grantee is the best?
What does green tea do for you?
Can green tea help you lose weight?
Can green tea cause diarrhea?
Can green tea be bad for you?
Which green tea is best for good skin?
Which green tea is best for thyroid?
Which green tea is best for diabetes?
Which green tea is best for weight loss?
So you kind of get the idea of what comes up. And of course, if I clicked on any of those such as you know, the question about diabetes, I would find the top ranking search result. According to Google for that particular question.
Now, what I love about this tool is the interface is just great. It's really simple. It's cleverly designed, perhaps more importantly though, is just the idea generation that can come from playing around with AnswerThePublic. In addition to the questions, questions like the ones that I just read out, you also can uncover what they call comparisons. So you can look at what are people comparing right now with your search term in this case, green tea.
So for example, is green tea better than matcha tea is grantee better than black coffee? And of course these could become things that you talk about, whether on social media, whether in your email, your, your blog, your podcast, whatever it is, they can become kind of content themes, because you can understand that this is actually what people are looking for right now.
Another awesome thing about AnswerThePublic is that you can find all of this stuff in alphabetical order again. So if I just click back to the screen with AnswerThePublic, you can see things like green tea benefits, green tea benefits for skin, green tea benefits for weight loss, green tea, benefits, and side effects, and you can find all sorts of things. And the other awesome thing about this is that you can literally hit a button at the top that says download CSV file. So that's just sort of similar to an Excel sheet and you can download that and get all of that information, the questions, the comparison, the alphabetical sort of stuff, and you can download everything and basically have your blog content done for a year.
To take it further. Like I mentioned before, if you click on any of the questions that come up, you'll be taken to the current top ranking search result for that question and just reading some of those, you know, going clicking through, having a look at what's out there may give you ideas on how to format your content online, or even ideas around the key points or even ideas around imagery. Now, definitely I'm not suggesting that you just click on them and copy at all what you find, but it definitely can give you help with ideas and just breaking the content drought that we can all find ourselves in sometimes.
So AnswerThePublic is just a really great, simple tool that can help you when it comes to brainstorming content, seeing what people really want to know about when it comes to your key product or service or subject matter, or just the key words that you're really trying to rank for. As I said, you can find it at answerthepublic.com and you can also find a full transcript of today's episode over at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/39 as this is episode 39.
Now I should point out that I don't get paid for any of these tips or tools or tactics that I share with you. I'm not an affiliate of AnswerThePublic. I'm not an affiliate of anything that I recommend on here. I'm recommending it solely and100% purely because I found it to be really useful in my own business, but also for the clients that I work with.
So if you're new here and you're looking for more quick tips for your business, definitely go back and binge on the past tip episodes that I've shared, and it makes sure that you hit subscribe so you don't miss out on any future ones. These quick tip episodes come out every single Tuesday, Australian time. Thank you so much for listening. I'll see you in the next episode. Bye.
Thanks for listening to the My Daily Business Coach podcast. If you want to get in touch, you can do that at mydailybusinesscoach.com or hit me up on Instagram at @mydailybusinesscoach.
