At least once a month, preferably more, take time to find the most important news stories in your niche and blog about them to pull traffic to your site. You can find these on Google News, your Feedly account, LinkedIn or specific niche sites.
Because if it's trending, you have an opinion on it!
Top TV show hosts like Ellen and This Morning do this brilliantly. They wait for inspiring stories to take off in the newspaper or on YouTube and then they invite that person on to the show.
For example, a video of a funny baby takes off on YouTube and generates 20 thousand views. Ellen invites the parents and the baby to come and talk about their experience. She then gives them a £10,000 vacation. The video clip in turn gets millions of views-because people were already talking about that baby, and Ellen becomes a part of that conversation.
You can leverage the same principle in your business. By tapping into an existing popular topic, you can virtually guarantee that people want to read and talk about your content.
This works not just with YouTube videos, but with blogs, articles and social media posts.
How to Find Popular and Trending Topics
So how do you find out what topics people are interested in? By using trend research tools. Here are a few fantastic tools to try out:
Google Trends– Google Trends allows you to research the most talked about topics and see which ones are growing or declining. All you need to do is type in a keyword that’s relevant to your business.
Linkedin.com–Search Linkedin and see what the trending posts are in your subject area. What ones do you think your business should have an opinion on? Once you’ve found out what content is trending and popular, try to get something out fast.
If you’re talking about timely topics, it often pays to be first. Yes, proofread it yourself–but you might be better off not having someone else proofread; and instead just posting it.
The best place to post is LinkedIn Pulse, and link back to your website in the article. Using this strategy, you’ll be able to tie into existing interests and generate more traffic for your website and LI profile as a result. This kind of content naturally gets more shares, links and views!
Pros & Cons of Tapping into Trending Content
Pros:
- You can get record amounts of traffic to your site
- It can lead to media appearances
Cons:
- You have to be alert for the opportunity
- The content isn't evergreen
- It can be hard to get the right images for the content
