Сontent plan for a month in 10 minutes: possible or not?
We all are suffering from the creative crisis from time to time, especially while creating a content plan at the beginning of the month. It’s a common problem of every person who is involved in the process of writing. Let’s try to withstand it.

In this post, I’ll show one method which helps me to automate the creating of a content plan. Okay, it may take you a bit more than 10 minutes, but I can guarantee that you’ll find dozens of ideas.

Where we usually find it 

It’s not that difficult to come up with 10 random topics. It’s much more difficult if you remember that the article should always be relevant to reader’s interest and need. Only this way you’ll get traffic, likes, and shares.

So how to find such topics? I think the most logical way is to find what questions people ask at Google, but there are other ways as well. I’ll describe the most common ways and sources to do that.
Forums

Check the forums and find questions people ask right now. Pay attention to the questions that haven’t been answered fully so far. Be the one who saves people from this pernicious ignorance.

I use Google operators to find such forums. For example: yourkeyword inurl:forum




Check all your queries with this method and follow the discussions. Also, after publishing the post, you can get back to this forums and leave a link to your article there.

Even simpler way is to find lists of the best forums. There are a lot of such lists like this.

Question-and-answer sites 

Use resources like Quora, Reddit, etc. You can sort the results by type and time.



The method is the same: find interesting questions, check the answers and choose few of these ideas to cover in your future posts. 

Competitors

Go and find some inspiration on competitors’ blogs. You shouldn’t rewrite their posts, just pick up some ideas from the most popular posts and write your own opinion on it.

For instance, if your competitor has a post on how to carry out the link building issues, write that content marketing is much better and show how to do it.

Also, you can check most popular articles in your niche using tools like BuzzSumo.


You can type your keyword and filter your results by date. You’ll get the list of most shareable articles so that you can assume what people would like to read.
Also, here are a few useful tips to write better.

Some other hacks

• Take a look at the discussions in the topical social media communities;
• Read the comments under the articles in your niche and get out the readers’ problems from there;
• Type your keywords into the Google search box and check related queries suggested by Google;
• Ask friends and experts in your niche and find out what they would like to read;
• Track Google Alerts and Google Trends;
• Ask your readers through some questionnaires.

Automate the creation of a content plan

All these ways I’ve described are efficient and useful, but imagine how much time it takes. It’s obvious that content marketers are trying to automate this process.

For this purpose, I use Serpstat — an all-in-one SEO tool. It consists of 5 features, one of them is a keyword research. The most interesting section here is Search Questions.

This feature performs people’s queries in forms of questions. It’s taken from Google, Amazon, and YouTube in real time. Serpstat arranges them in groups by the question word. Let’s try it.

In action

Imagine that you’re running some beauty blog and you lack the ideas. First of all, create a list of your main keywords. For example — makeup, manicure, hair styling, hair care, skin care advice, etc.

Open Serpstat, type your keyword into the search box and choose the database. Serpstat has 17 regional databases, including UK, US, Canada, and Germany. Tew days back it launched the French base.

Then go to Keyword research > Content Marketing > Search Questions.



Here you see the most popular words which are related to the query, and graph of question words.

And here is the best part — a huge list of questions that real people are searching for in the search engines.



What is it? It’s a list of topics for your articles. Now you have to do some work manually. Filter this list, choose the ones that fit your blog and create a plan. Mine looks like this:



You can find some useless or completely stupid questions but you should think wider. Even these questions can be used for the article. For instance, ‘the most strange users’ questions about SEO of this month’.

Conclusions

There are a lot of ways to find users questions, but it takes a lot of time.

With the help of SEO tools, you can get hundreds of questions from the real users in a few minutes. Answer it in your posts, and next time Google will return your article for this queries.

Share your own hacks on how to handle content plan issues faster in the comments below!

About the author:
Anna Rud is a Content Marketer at Serpstat. Developing rich and quality content and implementing brand strategy are her key responsibilities.
https://twitter.com/anathewriter