What is your strategy in looking for content to write relative to your niche?

[PaulDylan]

looking to keep adding to our blog in a big way. Things I use are questions we get a lot, we add them to blog and answer them - works quite nicely. Look at other blogs although in our industry its not really there, etc.

What are some of your strategies for looking for content to write about?

[EGOL]

I like this question because I spend most of my time creating content and have an employee who produces all of the photos and images.

I am looking for a few things...

1. topics that have good search volume

2. topics for which I can produce best-on-the-web articles

3. topics that will produce valuable adsense or lead to product conversions

4. topics that my visitors will want to read

5. topics that have WOW! factor

6. topics that are "MUST HAVE" for a site like mine

I have a huge list (several lists, in fact) of topic ideas.  I assess them on the basis of....

a) what is the most sharable (will produce likes, links, emails, etc)

b) what has the most income potential

c) what will be the most fun to produce

Mentally a, b, and c are the axes of a chart in 3 dimensional space.   I am looking to produce the content that plots farthest away from the origin; however, I must admit that "C" usually wins - and that is OK because that is the content that will perform the best and for which I will be most productive.

[PaulDylan]

whats your method of assesing topic search volume? basic keyword research?

[EGOL]

I use the adwords keyword tool.  I look at "exact match" primarily.... however, my content is usually very long - at least 1000 words.  So, I also look at broad match for lots of long tail queries.

Usually long tail does not influence the content unless I see queries with lots of search that I can include as subtopics.

[PaulDylan]

and hows that worked out for you? honestly - we don't create content based on keyword research -

[EGOL]

Keyword research isn't the primary driver.  But I check to see if the queries have adequate volume to justify the time required to produce the content.