Answer the Public

In this installment of the MAC5 Social Tools Suite, we’re talking about Answer the Public – a website (or content discovery tool) that helps you find & write content your customer is looking for …

Content is king.  Content converts.  45% of marketers say: Blogging is the #1 most important piece of their content strategy.

You’ve heard the stats before, you may even have heard me say them to you.  Blogging remains one of the most effective ways to share your marketing messages and it’s also an excellent way to connect with your target market.

An entertaining blog that’s informative and accessible will provide a form of value to your readers and prospective customers.  If the blog content answers a burning question, solves a problem or is otherwise useful to the reader, they may share your content on even further.

Of course, this means that you first need to identify topics that your customers may actually want to read about.  You need to create content that addresses those topics and then get it out there so that your soon-to-be customers can find it – and you.  That’s the part that can get a little tricky …

I stumbled across a website called AnswerThePublic last week and had a lot of fun playing with the data visualization tool.  Before we get into all that however, let me first explain what this website does and why you might find it helpful to your blogging strategy.

What is Answer The Public ?

In a nutshell, AnswerThePublic aggregates search query data from Google and Bing and presents it to you in a compelling visualization that is both easy to understand and even easier to share across departments.  For example, I work with clients on their social media strategies so I write blog content about social media strategies.  Sometimes I hit the nail on the head and get the right combination of topic matter, search terms and headlines!  Sometimes though, I could use a little help figuring out what, exactly people want to know right now about social media.

How Answer The Public Works

So I head on over to Answer the Public and enter a word or phrase (in this case “social media”) into the Seeker aka the question box.  Next, I determine my geographical location to ensure that I get data mined from the people I want to reach (in this case “US” because there is not a “CAN” option).  Then I hit “Get Questions” to see what comes up.

Visual Results

Answer the Public offers results from questions (who, what, when, why, where, how, are and which) and from prepositions  (like, near, with, versus, without, for and to) typed into search engines and in this case, there are HUNDREDS of results but I’m not worried because the visualization tool breaks it down for me so I’m not overwhelmed while trying to understand it all.

Creating Killer Content

Looking at the chart, I can see some popular questions on social media are “How Social Media Affects Teens” or “What Social Media Is Best For Business” and now I have some content suggestions I can work with.  I can keep those titles, dull as they are and use the search terms liberally throughout the pieces or I can write a more compelling headline (Start Ups Report Twitter As Best Marketing Tool For Business) and use the Answer the Public verbiage as a header or in the regular content. Basically I get content ideas and SEO help all in one super convenient infograph.

Related: The infograph is easy to download (png file) with a transparent background to be used in a power point presentation to convince your boss to increase your marketing budget for blogging, it’s all set for you!

Did I mention the whole thing is free?  You’re welcome – now tweet to us with the awesome blog posts you’re about to go write!