Want to know what’s trending in your industry, or to find hot topics to write about for your blog?
Writing about and sharing popular subjects will help draw traffic to your blog or your website. It will also show your readers that you’re on top of your game by keeping up with the latest updates in your industry.
Here are several ways you can research what’s hot and what’s not.
Buzz Sumo
BuzzSumo is a great free tool that enables you to find the most popular articles on any given topic.
All you do is plug in a subject or keyword, and a range of articles with various headlines will come up.
It shows how many shares an article has on major social media networks. You can filter results by date, content type, language, and country.
The free version shows a limited number of articles. The paid version will give you in-depth metrics as well as many more ideas to build upon for article topics for your blog.
Google Trends
Google has a plethora of information, of course, on what people are looking for on the Web. It has compiled all this information and statistics and plugged it into their tool Google Trends.
With this tool, you can find the top trending articles and subjects on anything from politics to business to entertainment.
Search by keyword, topics, and categories. Plugin a few variations on your subject to see which compositions are more popular.
The tool also shows you regions where the term is more popular and related searches, which will give you more ideas upon which to expand.
Google Search
Google Search results show how many Web pages are devoted to a particular subject (see photo below). It also shows what other topics people are searching for on the Web.
Scroll to the bottom of a search page, and you’ll see more searches related to your given subject.
Gather up these suggestions and plug them into Portent’s Content Idea Generator to come up with striking headlines. You might not stick with the suggested headline, but it will help you get going on what to write.
Quora
Quora is a fantastic place to find answers to almost anything. It’s also an excellent source of interesting questions and topics.
While the platform connects the questioners with those who can give answers, you can still grab some relevant topics to write about for your readers.
You’ll need to sign up for an account to use Quora. Once you do, to find hot topics, type in a few keywords. Immediately Quora shows you related queries and suggested issues. Choose one or search for your complete term, and a host of questions with your keywords will come up.
You can filter results by time, questions, and answers.
Twitter Search
Twitter is a fast-moving platform where trending topics go viral in minutes.
To find what people are talking about on this site, type in a keyword into the Twitter app search bar. You will discover how many tweets in the past hour and past day include your term.
Twitter also shows other popular search terms related to yours.
Refine your search by using a hashtag with your keyword or keyphrase.
Facebook Hashtag Search
Hashtags searches can be used on almost every social media platform to find hot topics and conversations.
Facebook breaks down hashtag searches by posts from friends, groups, and public posts that include your hashtag. It also finds comments that people have made and contained the hashtag.
You can also filter search results by date, location, and type.
In Summary
These six methods will help you gather enough hot topics for months. Just make sure when you write your posts, you add your unique insight into the subject to give added value to your readers.
Happy writing!