It is difficult to overstate the importance of headlines. A good headline can entice and engage your audience to click, to read, and to share your content. In many cases headlines are the thing that is shared rather than the article. So you knew that. But do you know what makes an engaging headline?

To help answer this question we analyzed 100 million article headlines. We have set out below our findings from the research including the:

• Headline phrases that drive most engagement on Facebook
• Worst performing headline phrases on Facebook
• Most effective phrases that start or end headlines
• Optimum number of words and characters to use in a headline
• Most impactful numbers to use in headlines
• Most engaging Twitter headline phrases
• Differences between B2C and B2B headlines

While there is no magic formula for creating a viral or popular headline, there are many lessons we can learn to improve our content engagement. We shared our findings with a number of content experts to reflect on the implications of the research for writers. We have included their expert thoughts and advice at the end of this post. We have also included a section on how you can analyze headlines yourself using BuzzSumo.

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Note: This research looks at the most shared headlines on Facebook and Twitter which tend to be dominated by major publishers and consumer content. Thus the insights will be particularly interesting for publishers. We are undertaking separate research on engaging headlines for business to business content which we will publish later this year.

Most Engaging Headline Phrases: The Data

In our survey of 100m headlines published between 1st March 2017 and 10th May 2017, the three word phrases or trigrams that gained the most Facebook engagements (likes, shares, comments) were as follows.

Why The Data Will Make You Think Again About Headlines

In our sample the most powerful three word phrase used in a headline (by some margin) was:

  “Will make you … “

This phrase “will make you” gained more than twice the number of Facebook engagements as the second most popular headline trigram. This was a surprise. When we started out looking for top trigrams, this one wasn’t even on our list.

So why does this particular trigram or three word phrase work so well? One of the interesting things is that it is a linking phrase. It doesn’t start or end a headline, rather it makes explicit the linkage between the content and the potential impact on the reader.

This headline format sets out why the reader should care about the content. It also promises that the content will have a direct impact on the reader, often an emotional reaction. The headline is clear and to the point which makes it elegant and effective.

Typical headlines include:

• 24 Pictures That Will Make You Feel Better About The World
• What This Airline Did for Its Passengers Will Make You Tear Up – So Heartwarming
• 6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person
• “Who Wore It Better?” Pics That Will Make You Laugh Out Loud
• 13 Travel Tips That Will Make You Feel Smart

See the most shared “will make you” headlines from the last year.

Emotional Headlines Drive Facebook Interactions

In our analysis we found that emotional phrases were consistently effective on Facebook as measured by the number of interactions. For example:

• Tears of joy
• Make you cry
• Give you goosebumps
• Is too cute
• Shocked to see
• Melt your heart
• Can’t stop laughing

Many of the top performing posts with emotional headlines had image or video content although there were also story posts. Below is an example video post.

Despite the strong performance of emotional posts, content writers increasingly have to be careful in using emotional and sensational language. In May 2017 Facebook announced it will demote “headlines that exaggerate the details of a story with sensational language” and which aim “to make the story seem like a bigger deal than it really is.”

Curiosity and Voyeurism Also Gain Facebook Engagement

Headline phrases that provoke curiosity and a sense of voyeurism also gained a high level of engagement on Facebook. For example:

• What happened next
• Talking about it
• Twitter reacts to
• Are freaking out
• Top x songs

Readers are often curious about what is being talked about by people, what the top items are in a league table, or what is being said by people on Twitter about a topic or event. This type of content appeals to a reader’s sense of curiosity and voyeurism. If you are curious, here are the most shared posts in the last year that have “are freaking out” in the headline.

We would caution writers to avoid ‘what happened next’ style headlines. While they have previously performed well, Facebook now categorises headlines that withhold information as clickbait and demotes them. In my personal view this is a good thing and I hope we will see an end to such clickbait headlines.

Other Engaging Headline Phrases

Explanations

• This is why
• The reason is

These phrases are also linked strongly to curiosity. For example:

• And this is why women live longer than men…
• This is why you should be sleeping on your left side

We all want to feel that bit smarter after reading a piece of content. Explainer articles promise you an extra nugget of insight. In some ways they are similar to the “will make you” phrase headline as they make a promise about what you’ll gain as a result of reading the article.

Here are the most shared ‘this is why’ headlines of the last year.

Quizzes

• Can we guess
• Only x in

These phrases are used in popular quiz headlines, for example:

• Can We Guess Your Real Age?
• Only 1 In 50 People Can Identify These 16 Grammar Mistakes. Can You?

Quizzes remain an engaging format on Facebook. The first of these headline types is a quiz variation, it challenges you to answer to questions and to see if the quiz can then predict your age, level of education, job etc., based on your answers. These quizzes appeal to our desire to know more about ourselves and to prove we’re smart, we did grow up in the 80s, we are living in the right city, or whatever it might be. These quizzes are like mirrors, it’s hard to walk past with out looking at yourself. They are hard to ignore.

Tribal headlines

• X things only

These popular headlines appeal to a sense of tribal belonging for example:

• 25 Things Only Teachers Will Understand
• 17 Things Only Moms of Twins Understand
• 9 Things Only Girls Who Grew Up With Older Brothers Will Understand
• 10 Things Only Night Shift Nurses Understand

Here are the most shared examples of ‘things only’ headlines in the last year.

We have seen a significant growth in tribal headlines, particularly politically partisan headlines. It is almost as if there is a duty on the tribe to share posts that support their viewpoints. We saw this in the US elections and we have seen something similar in the recent UK elections. These tribal headlines tend to gain a lot of engagement and shares, which might be encouraging sites to use polemical headlines more frequently.

 The Worst Performing Phrases

We thought it would also be interesting to examine the commonly used phrases in headlines that receive the lowest Facebook engagement.

Note: We only looked at phrases or trigrams that were used on a minimum of 100 different domains. There will be worse performing phrases than those used above but these are the worst performing commonly used phrases.

It was interesting to see how poorly phrases like ‘on a budget’ performed on Facebook. While some individual articles did well, the average Facebook engagement was very low. By contrast the phrase ‘on a budget’ appears to work really well on Pinterest for DIY topics. See the examples below.

This highlights the importance of context. It may simply be that Facebook is not a place where someone is actively looking for tips to save money and that the Pinterest DIY context is better suited to this content. This reinforces the need to research what works for your audience, your topics and specific social networks.  A headline may perform poorly on Facebook but work very well with a different audience on a different social network. The same is true when writing for different sectors, for example a phrase like ‘need to know’ may work well in say health but work less well in a different context. The key is to research what resonates with your specific audience and to test your headlines.

Phrases That Start Or End Headlines

The most popular phrase “will make you” is a phrase that clearly sits in the centre of a headline as it connects two elements. Thus it creates the structure by linking something to an emotional reaction.

This was partly a surprise as previous research has suggested the most important part of a headline is the first three words and the last three words. It may be that using a linking phrase such as “will make you” actually emphasizes the importance of both the beginning and end of the sentence.

We thought it would be useful to look at the top three word phrases that start headlines and the phrases that end headlines.

Below are the most popular phrases that start headlines by number of Facebook interactions (x represents a number).

Below are the most popular phrases that end headlines by number of Facebook interactions (x represents a number).

Finally, below are the most popular first words that start headlines by average Facebook interactions.

Two word phrases

In our analysis we also looked at the most shared bigrams or two word combinations. Often these were part of longer three word phrases or trigrams that we have previously identified, for example:

• ‘Make you’ – part of ‘will make you’
• ‘Is why’ – part of ‘this is why’

There were, however, a few exceptional two word phrases that gained a high level of average engagements. These included:

• ‘goes viral’           9,746 average engagements
• ‘most beautiful’    3,921 average engagements

Both of these align with the high engaging headline types we found when looking at three word phrases. The first is a form of voyeuristic content which provokes curiosity for example ‘High School Seniors Paint Their Parking Spots And Their Art Goes Viral On Twitter’.

The second is a form of emotional content with often an explicit promise of exceptional content. For example ‘Clementinum In Prague Is The Most Beautiful Library In The World’. This particular example, was picked up and reused by Bored Panda with a similar headline ‘The World’s Most Beautiful Library Is In Prague, Czech Republic’. Both posts got over 250,000 Facebook engagements.

Here are the most shared posts of the last year with ‘goes viral’ in the headline.

The Power of List Posts and the Number 10 in Headlines

Many of the most engaging phrases contain numbers, and many use a list post format i.e. headlines that start with a number. It is well known that list posts gain above average social shares. We were interested to see if there was any variation between the performance of different numbers, for example a list post starting with 10 or say 4. The table below shows the average Facebook engagements for different number list posts in our sample.

We can see that the number 10 was the highest performing headline number, which confirms previous research in this area. Our research found that the next three best performing numbers in headlines were 5, 15 and 7.

Many marketers have advocated using unique numbers or much longer numbers for comprehensive articles. Buzzfeed have had a lot of success with the number 23 for example, but on average 10, 5, 15 and 7 are the top performing list posts.

How Many Words Should be in your Headlines? More Than You Think

Let’s look at the length of your headline. Experts such as Jacob Neilson have argued that the best headlines for news sites are very short. Jacob argues for as short as five words or less than 40 characters. Buffer’s Kevan Lee wrote a comprehensive post which suggested blog post headlines should ideally be six words or less than 50 characters. By contrast, research from Outbrain looking at 100,000 posts, suggests that 16 to 18 words and 80 to 110 characters is optimal for driving engagement. When it comes to email subject lines, research by MailChimp suggests that it doesn’t really matter how long subject lines are.

We decided to test these assumptions. with our sample of 100m articles published between 1st March and 10 May 2017.  We analyzed the number of words in article headlines and plotted this number against the average number of Facebook engagements for all headlines in our sample. The results are shown on the chart below.

We can see that posts with twelve to eighteen words in the headline receive the highest number of Facebook engagements on average. As headlines get longer or shorter the average number of Facebook engagements decline.

Twelve plus words may sound like a lot, though if you’re going to make clear the topic, format and use an effective trigram you will need them. Here are some examples:

This Infographic Shows How Only 10 Companies Own All The World’s Food Brands

E-Cigarettes Found to Have 10 times More Cancer Causing Ingredients than Regular Cigarettes

We also looked at the relationship between the number of characters in a headline and average FB engagements. Our findings were as follows:

Not surprisingly the number of characters has a similar relationship to average Facebook engagements as the number of words. In essence 80 to 95 characters appears optimal.

Thus our research findings would tend to support Outbrain’s previous research that longer headlines work better when it comes to engagement.

Headline Phrases That Engage On Twitter

Will a headline that works on Facebook work equally well on Twitter? Not necessarily. We found the headline phrases that gained the most engagement on Twitter were quite distinct from those that gained high engagement on Facebook. The main exception was the powerful “will make you” phrase which was the top phrase on Facebook and also the fourth most shared phrase on Twitter.

What is particularly interesting is the lack of emotional phrases in the top headlines that resonate on Twitter. This is very different to our findings for Facebook.

The top Twitter phrases have a focus on newness such as “for first time” and “is the new”.

The top trigrams shared on Twitter also focus more on explanations and analysis for example:

• The truth about
• The rise of
• Things to know
• This is what
• What we know

You can test the impact of different headlines on Twitter by trying different text in your tweets.

B2B Headlines

Update: 18th July 2017. We have now completed our analysis of the best B2B headlines where we reviewed the 10 million most shared posts on LinkedIn in 2017. We found significant differences between the best headline phrases, structures, numbers and lengths for B2B headlines compared to B2C headlines.

You can read the full analysis and post here: The best B2B headline phrases, words and formats based on 10 million posts shared on LinkedIn.

The top phrases in headlines shared on LinkedIn were as follows.

We also found a significant difference between optimum headline lengths for B2B and B2C content. The optimum number of words in B2B headlines was much lower as we can see below. The red line is average LinkedIn shares and the blue line is average Facebook shares.

The key point is that there is no simple formula or approach when it comes to popular headlines, you need to research and understand the headlines that resonate with your audience and industry.

Expert Reflections and Advice

We shared our research with a number of content experts to get their thoughts, reflections and advice for content writers. Here is their take on the findings.

Ann Handley

1. Spend as much time writing the headline as you do an entire blog post or social post. Why? Because the headline matters. (Really matters.) (I do this, by the way.)
2.  Test what resonates with YOUR audience. (Not mine. And not your co-working neighbor’s. And not your dog sitter’s uncle’s audience. YOURS.)
3.  Burn some brain cells getting a little creative with your headlines. This research hopefully inspires you to rethink headlines, because it tells you what kind of headlines have worked for 100m posts in the past. But of course, it’s just a measure of what has worked, not what will work. Think more deeply: What does it suggest? What might it inspire? Use this data as a kind of guidepost to inspire your own, new, never-before-trodden path.”

Andy Crestodina

“I’m sure that some marketers will take this research as prescriptive advice and cram every top trigram into a 15 word headline. “This is why these 10 stunning photos will make you cry tears of joy!” I’ll admit, I’d probably click that.

But think for a minute about the cause behind the correlations. This research is telling us to give readers stronger reasons to click.

Every time our readers see a headline, they do a split second cost-benefit calculation. It doesn’t matter if they’re in an inbox, a social stream or a search results page. The psychology is the same. Is this thing worth two seconds of my time?

The headline’s job is to answer this question. Here’s how:

• Take as many words as you need to make the case that the click is worth it
• Be specific (this is why, this is how, the reason is)
• If it’s not emotional, it better be useful (work for you, x simple tips, you should use)

This research holds some very powerful insights. I’m sure it will change how many marketers craft their headlines. For me, the big takeaway is to maximize the perceived benefit of the click. Because that’s the game we’re all playing: we only click when the likely benefits exceed the cost of 2-seconds of our attention!”

Heidi Cohen

“The B2B research reveals an opportunity for marketers and content creators to stand out not by following the pack but by applying the emotional elements that work for posts in general. B2B content and marketing has come a long way thanks to Joe Pulizzi and Ann Handley but it can go further by tapping into the human voice and connection.”

Michael Brenner

“There are three important things to note from the research.

Headlines matter. Maybe that sounds obvious and most of us know this. But do we all spend as much time as we should on headlines? I suggest spending nearly as much time on the headline as on the article itself!

Curiosity drives shares. Captain obvious here again. But the trick is to find a way to spark that curiosity in every headline. It’s why headlines that start with “Here’s why…” or “The one thing that will make you…” work really well. Because they spark instant curiosity. They make us feel compelled to read.

Tell stories. Yes, you can tell a story in a 15 word headline. Hemingway did it in 6 words with his “For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.” We tell stories to convey emotion. To bring people into our frame of the world. To forget where they are for a moment. To make them the hero on a journey to a better place.”

Larry Kim

 “I’m blown away at how hard people work on producing content only to slap on a crappy headline as an afterthought. If you have a great article, don’t sabotage yourself by using a weak hook – there’s nothing wrong with using these catchy phrases. Stop fighting them! Like it or not, click through rates play an ever increasing role in the organic search and social news feed algorithms that essentially determine if your content is seen or not. Why produce content if not to be consumed? Stop shooting yourself in the foot and use this research.”

Headline Review Questions

The danger of this type of research is that people simply look to reuse the most shared phrases or words in their headlines. However, the real value of the research is a better understanding of the formats and principles of the headlines that resonate with readers. The research suggests that the characteristics of engaging headlines typically include one or more of the following:

• A focus on why the reader should care
• Clarity and promise
• Emotional hooks
• Provoke curiosity
• Provide explanations
• Appeal to a tribe

The research also reinforces the importance of context and of understanding what works in your specific context, such as your audience, your industry, your topics and your social networks.  

With these points in mind here are some questions that may be useful to ask when formulating your headlines:

• Why should the reader care about your content?
• Can you make a promise or claim about the impact of your article on the reader?
• Can you include an emotional element – especially if looking to gain traction on Facebook?
• Are you tapping into a trending topic, if so can you call it out in the headline?
• Can you make it a quiz or challenge?
• Could you position it as an explanation or answer post?
• Who’s your tribe – what headlines resonate with them?
• Will a more partisan or controversial headline appeal to your tribe?
• Are you aiming for 12-18 words in your headline?

How Did We Decide On The Headline For This Post?

We brainstormed a range of possible headlines including ones such as ‘Headlines That Engage: Insights from 100m Posts.’ When we did further research using BuzzSumo, we looked specifically at large research projects in the marketing sector and found that ‘we analyzed’ and ‘we learned’ worked really well as a structure. For example:

• We Analyzed 1 Million Google Search Results. Here’s What We Learned About SEO Methodology (7.5k Shares and 1,400 links)

Thus after much deliberation and discussion we decided on using this format for the post headline.

Methodology Note

We looked at the headlines of 100m articles published from March 1st, 2017 to May 10, 2017 and analysed those that gained the most social shares.

We specifically looked at top trigrams (three word phrases) used in headlines. We started by ignoring trigrams that were topics such as  “Game of Thrones”.

We were conscious that popular sites can skew the results, therefore for this analysis we only included one headline trigram example per domain. For instance, “can we guess” is a very popular BuzzFeed trigram thus we would only have included one “can we guess” headline from BuzzFeed in our trigram analysis. From the subsequent list we then removed the three most shared examples of each trigram to remove potential outliers, such as a post that got say 100,000 shares.

For our analysis of the optimum number of words and characters in headlines we included all 100m posts.

How To Analyze Headline Phrases Using BuzzSumo

If you want to do some analysis of headline phrases yourself, you can simply put a phrase in double quotes into BuzzSumo such as “can we guess”. The search will return the most shared articles with that phrase in the headline and display the share counts from each network and the number of linking domains. Here is an example of the most shared posts for “the future of“.  You can further refine your search by adding additional words after the phrase in quotes, here is an example: “the future of” Elon Musk. This will return the most shared headlines with the phrase “the future of” and Elon Musk. You can do this for multiple phrases or phrases and topics.

The various BuzzSumo paid plans allow you to review the most shared headline phrases over the past five years and to export up to 10,000 examples of each phrase with share and link data for further analysis. You can also:

• search in any language
• restrict searches to country top level domains such as .FR
• restrict searches to just headlines used for say infographics or videos
• view successful headlines of long form or short form content, here are most shared “need to know” headlines for posts over 2,000 words
• view the most shared headlines for specific domains such as New York Times
• view the performance of specific phrases on domains, such as “need to know” on New York Times

You may also be interested in our previous post on how to create viral headlines.

Over emphasis on buyers at the bottom of the sales funnel has led marketers to neglect content marketing for ecommerce. They ignore the pool of prospects who are in the research and education phases of the buying process. 

Ecommerce marketers should learn from the retailers of years gone by: content marketing works. It has been convincing consumers to buy since long before our grandparents were born. 

One of the early pioneers of content marketing was Jell-O, who started running content marketing campaigns (focused around their recipe books) in the early 1900’s.

Here’s a list article that Jell-O published in the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1934, with a call to action for a free recipe book:

As the saying goes, there’s nothing new under the sun.

We have clickbait, conversion funnels, and lead magnets. But our great-grandmarketers were writing list posts with CTAs for free books a century before it was cool! Their strategy included content marketing for ecommerce success. 

[clickToTweet tweet=”Content marketing in ecommerce allows us to reach and build relationships with a much larger audience.” quote=”Why is content marketing great for ecommerce? It allows us to reach and build relationships with a much larger audience.”]

Four things to expect from content marketing for ecommerce:

1. Attracts customers that are earlier in the buying process
2. Educates and guides customers towards a buying decision
3. Builds a deeper relationship with customers and prospects
4. Creates positive brand appeal with target audiences

Let’s dig into some data to see what types of content marketing work best for ecommerce sites…

See The Most Viral Ebooks and Guides at BuzzSumo

What Makes Content Marketing For Ecommerce Go Viral? Data, Please!

Over the years, I’ve worked on quite a few content marketing campaigns for ecommerce. It’s critical for blog posts to be hosted on https sites, as Google’s warning that a site isn’t secure will driver readers away.

It’s also important to think about what types of content work best. But for this article, I dug into BuzzSumo’s data to learn which types of content drive the most buzz for ecommerce sites. Here’s what I did:

1. Identified 12 top ecommerce websites that are actively using content marketing.
2. Identified the 100 most-shared content pieces across all 12 sites during the past year.
3. Reviewed each content piece and manually classified it according to several characteristics.
4. Analyzed the content pieces to identify trends using Excel and PowerBI.

Here’s what I found!

Don’t expect 50 gazillion shares

Even though I was analyzing content pieces from big, well-known brands, none of them had massive viral success. This shouldn’t be surprising, as the BuzzSumo Content Trends 2018 report showed that on average social shares are down by 50%.

Here are the social share metrics for the 100 pieces I analyzed:

• The average piece had 8,064 shares.
• The highest piece had 72,829 shares.
• The lowest piece had 2,891 shares.

Content for ecommerce doesn’t always have to be long

In some industries (such as B2B) super long content (e.g. 2,000+ words) gets the most social shares. That trend may not hold true for ecommerce, though:

• The average length of the top 100 content pieces was just 945 words.
• Only 12 of the pieces were over 2,000 words long.
• Pieces over 1,000 words long had an average of 6,774 social shares.
• Pieces under 1,000 words averaged 9,029 social shares.

Sometimes, shorter content can be better!

Enter Your Topic In BuzzSumo To Find The Best Content Length

Multimedia is important

Nearly all of the top 100 posts included multimedia, and 59% of the pieces were multimedia-driven (meaning that photos, video, or graphics were at the core of what the piece was).

Use your ecommerce content marketing to connect with a cause

While analyzing the pieces, I noticed that 43% of the content pieces were related to a cause that readers might feel a close connection to, passion for, or identify with. For example:

• Content ranking the best cities/states for X (people love to brag about where they’re from).
• Posts covering topics around social issues such as inclusivity, education, child welfare, etc.
• Content that’s directly connected to specific interest-based communities (runners, star wars fans, etc.).

This shouldn’t be surprising: readers often share pieces they have an emotional reaction to.

What 88% of the content marketing for ecommerce pieces had

Nearly 90 of the of the 100 content pieces had at least one of these three characteristics:

• Multimedia driven
• Connected to a cause
• Timely (connected to a current news story, holiday, or event)

10 Examples Of Great Content Marketing For Ecommerce Stores

How can ecommerce stores use these ideas to create successful content? Here are 10 of the best content pieces from the 100 I analyzed – hopefully, some of these will trigger ideas that you can use in your own marketing campaigns!

List articles

Love them or hate them, listicles still work! Thirty \of the top 100 ecommerce content pieces were lists, making them the most common content type we found.

Don’t build a run-of-the mill list article. The internet doesn’t need more of those. Create a list article that connects with a cause or event your audience cares about and skillfully uses on multimedia. Here’s a great example from Expedia:

29 epic places to witness the 2017 solar eclipse

Cause-based content

One of the original research studies on content and social media sharing showed that certain emotions (awe, anger, etc.) trigger social sharing. That’s still true today, and connecting with a cause the reader is passionate about is a proven way to encourage social sharing. Here’s a great example from REI, where they connected with a cause their readers are very passionate about – cost and access to National Parks:

This piece triggered social shares and passionate endorsements across social media:

Photography-driven content

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. When it comes to social sharing, that’s certainly true! And you don’t have to be selling Hawaiian vacation packages to create great content with your photographs. Home Depot publishes some great photography-based how to content. The photos not only make the content piece visually attractive and highly professional, they make the directions a lot easier to follow. Here’s one they published on “The Easy Way To Paint A House”:

Realtors, DIYers, and other readers shared the post over 3,200 times.

Interactive content

People love apps. People love content that “does” something. Making your content truly interactive can increase your “cool factor” and increases the perceived value your content provides. In other words, it encourages readers to share your content. Several interactive pieces showed up on our top 100 list – REI’s All Out Blue Ridge was the one that caught my eye. It included multiple interactive tools such as this mountain bike trail finder:

Individuals and organizations passionate about the outdoors shared this resource far and wide:

Quizzes

A few years ago, quizzes became the dandelions of the internet, popping up everywhere. They still work, especially if they are well done.  Here’s a successful example from StitchFix, the personal style finder:

Giveaways & Contests

People love free stuff. Always have, and probably always will. Giving away free stuff (especially when the contest rules reward social sharing) is a great way for marketers to create buzz. A great example of this tactic was the Fly Me Home giveaway from Orbitz:

How-To

Teaching your readers how to do something with your products can be a great way to guide them toward a purchase without explicitly selling. The key is to build a super-valuable guide that walks the reader through each step of the process (use photos!). Here’s a fun example from Home Depot, Hosting a Spooky Halloween Dinner Party at Spider Temple. This piece includes 40+ photos showing in detail how to do each step of the process.

Product Deep Dives

Especially in technical areas (such as computers or photography) your audience may really appreciate product unveils and technical details from a subject matter expert. While this type of content marketing for ecommerce may sound boring, if done correctly it can drive a lot of social shares and traffic. Here’s an example from B&H Photo – an expert panel discussion on the new Nikon D850:

Photogs around the world shared the event in anticipation:

Stories; Interviews

One the oldest forms of communication, storytelling connects with readers and elicits social shares, links, traffic, and publicity. This is one of the most personal and human content types on the list. Based on what we know about the connection between emotional responses and social sharing, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that personal stories can drive a lot of social shares. Here’s a great example from REI:

The Guardian of Hope Pass: “For 30 years, Vicky Foster and her llamas have hauled beer, ramen and medical supplies to the highest aid station of the Leadville 100 ultramarathon. This year marks their final race.”

Shareable Products

Sometimes the best content marketing for ecommerce is the product itself.  Some online stores (*cough* ThinkGeek *cough*) have an unfair advantage in this arena, but nearly any ecommerce site can add unique products that fans will share. Even the most boring products can be customized to create a unique, shareable product. One of the top 100 pieces we analyzed was from Home Depot. Lumber, pipes and drills, all pretty boring stuff, right? Home Depot is selling a few cool products among the boring, though – including a set of Star Wars Stormtrooper Robotic Vacuum Cleaners. The category page for these products has been shared thousands of times on social media.

Promotion

Many conversations about top content pieces leave out one critical detail for success – promotion (a.k.a. amplification). Large brands like the ones we analyzed have an unfair advantage – they’ve already got a large audience that can share the piece and start the viral growth. If you’re doing content marketing for a smaller company, you may need to work harder to get the ball rolling. Here are a few ideas to get your content in front of more people:

• Send to your email list
• Post to social media profiles
• Post on Reddit (be careful, don’t get banned!)
• Boost your Facebook posts
• Run Facebook ads
• Amplify using Outbrain or other native ad networks
• Write guest blog posts
• Work with an influencer or other partner. More authors = more shares.

Conclusion

Content marketing can be a powerful tactic for ecommerce stores – it’s been a proven retail marketing strategy for over a century. What content marketing tactics have you found successful?

The business of content marketing is the business of ideas. Blog post ideas, newsletter or ebook ideas, ideas for courses or whitepapers—we need them all.

And we need a lot of them!

In most cases the general focus of our content will be set by business purpose. Business blogs must focus on topics that support the  product offering.

To support the business, with a profitable blog, content creators take a static subject area and write about it over and over again in (hopefully!) fresh and engaging ways. It’s a bit like rotating a gemstone and describing how the light bounces off different facets.

As content areas become saturated, and competition for attention increases, it’s more important than ever to be adept at finding topics closely related to our main subject areas.

In this post, we’ll look at how data can augment our creativity and help us discover endless blog post ideas.

A Data Driven Approach to Blog Post Ideas

At times, usually early in the life of a blog, it’s easier to come up with blog post ideas using creativity, intuition, and industry knowledge.

It’s the honeymoon phase of blogging! We should enjoy it (Also, make a scrapbook – we’ll need some of that inspiration later!)

But at some point we’ll run out of ideas, or we’ll be asked to justify the ideas we do have.

Customer interactions are a huge help at this point. Ask your customer success team what they think your customers are interested in.

To make that input practical, try the 10×10 exercise recommended by Stephanie Liu from Lights, Camera Live:.

• Take a sheet of paper and fold it in half.
• On one side write the 10 most frequently asked questions about your product or service.
• On the other, write the 10 questions people should be asking about your product or service but aren’t.
• Now, you have a list of at least 15 – 20 things to blog about.

Data can Augment and Simplify our Blog Post Idea Generation.

Google Analytics or other tools track site visits, and social signals help gauge audience interest, so we can iterate on our current blog post ideas.

To track site visits to a particular blog post, you’ll need the Behavior section of Google Analytics.

Apply a filter to limit the results to only your blog pages.

This data will show you which of your posts draw the most visitors. And, the Average Session Duration will tell you if they stuck around long enough to really engage with the content.

Social engagements help us to see what audiences are interested in.

For example, our most shared posts at BuzzSumo this year are lengthy guides or research reports.

Social engagement is a great proxy for audience interest. When we know that content about one facet of our product is grabbing social attention, we can increase our connection with our audiences by leveraging that topic.

In addition to looking at analytics and social shares,  it’s also critical to drill down into industry sources– reading, researching, and documenting trends as we go.

To truly benefit from this approach, consistency and commitment are required.

Ann Handley, author, speaker, and Chief Content Officer at Marketing Profs, recommends collecting and recording five writing ideas each day.

Here are a couple of sources to get you started:

• Amazon’s book previews: Look at chapter titles
• Google Trends: Use the explore option for your subject area
• Hashtagify.me: Look for variations of your topic areas in hashtag form
• Conference agendas: Look at the titles of keynote speeches and workshops
• Google’s “searches related to”: Located at the bottom of each search page

• Pinterest’s auto suggest: Look at the topics suggested at the top of search results

Finding and qualifying blog post ideas is time-consuming, especially if you write many posts a day or work for multiple clients.

Use Related Topics to Find Great Blog Post Ideas in Less Time

The BuzzSumo Topic Explorer is one way to save time. It suggests related topics, popular content,  AND a key question for any subject you write about.

The Topic Explorer adds a layer of artificial intelligence to our platform, allowing content creators to expand their reach (and their blog post ideas) to new subject areas.

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The Topic Explorer’s question suggestion is curated based on relevance. Each related topic includes additional subtopics to explore.

Once you know your audience’s preferred content formats, it’s easy to combine them with related topics to generate new blog post ideas.

For example, our audience likes original research and “How to” posts.

And, for our main topic area, “content marketing,” The Topic Explorer recommends the following related topics.

The table below shows how I might combine the two to come up with blog post ideas.

Another approach would be to look at individual questions in the related topics and work through them, adding How, Why, or List posts formats to create working titles. Infographics are also a great way to answer questions!

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Any source of related topics can be put through this grid to spur creativity!

If you have ideas from conference agendas, or from Google related searches, or from Pinterest auto-suggest, add them to your grid for even more blog post ideas.

Blog post ideas for saturated content areas

When faced with a saturated or overly competitive topic area, what do you do?

More ideas for the same saturated topic won’t necessarily help grab attention if there are already hundreds of thousands of published posts.

There are two mental models we find helpful to expand topics for saturated content areas.

Hierarchical expansion begins with a broad topic and looks to more and more specific themes. Andy Crestodina described this concept as “niching down.”

For example, if social media markeing is the topic I write about, and it’s saturated with content, I may want to consider narrowing my focus:

1. Social media marketing
   1. Facebook marketing
      1. Facebook Live
      2. Facebook Advertising
         1. AB testing Facebook ads
         2. Average Facebook ad spend for an SMB
            1. Saving money on Facebook ads as an SMB
            2. Which type of ad goal is the best value for an SMB
               1. Creating an a lead gen ad for an SMB
2. Content marketing

Lateral expansion looks at ideas that are related to each other at a similar level of specificity.  The litmus test for lateral expansion might be this:

People interested in X are also often interested in Y.

In the example above, Social Media Marketing and Content Marketing would be examples of lateral ideas. It passes the litmus test, “People interested in social media marketing are also often interested in content marketing.”

Of course, these two models are a little arbitrary! (Taxonomies are tough in every field of study.)

Laterally related topics can also be expressed as part of a hierarchy. They would simply be listed with the same level of importance.

And, specific areas of interest in a hierarchy are only “niche” in the sense that they can be considered a subset of a larger topic area. Niche areas will often have their own experts, big ideas, and areas of ongoing controversy or study.

However, the concepts of lateral and hierarchical expansion are useful for developing blog post ideas, especially if our main topic area is heavily competitive or already saturated with great content.

The Topic Explorer offers a quick look at lateral and hierarchically related ideas.

For each laterally related topic, there are more specific, niche keyword suggestions.

And, additional Topic Explorer searches can produce even more related and specific inspiration.

Qualify related topics

Once you have created a massive file of blog post ideas, how do you decide what to write about?

At its simplest, qualifying a topic is binanary:

Something is either a good idea or a bad idea.

But, if you have ever tried to convince your team of either, you know that you’ll need more than a hunch to persuade your boss, client, or colleague.

Qualifying topics is done in two phases – before you publish, and after you publish. In both phases data analysis can help guide the process.

Customer questions, customer surveys, social engagement with existing content, web traffic data, industry trends and thought-leader input all help us to select the best blog topics.

If you have a file of customer questions or survey responses try running them through a text analyzer to see which themes emerge. (Thanks to Gini Dietrich who suggested this approach for developing courses.) You can do the same thing with conference agendas, etc.

For example, here is a wordcloud of topics from the 2019 Social Media Marketing World agenda, created at jasondavies.com/wordcloud (I removed the word marketing).

I also did simple text analysis to find the words used most in the presentation descriptions:

1. Facebook
2. Content
3. Video
4. Sales
5. Business
6. Live
7. Instagram
8. Build
9. Grow
10. Linkedin
    
    

With this analysis, I can see what industry leaders are thinking about and use these hot topics to validate blog post ideas.

For example ‘Facebook Live’, ‘YouTube content’, or ‘use of bots in marketing’ all seem like good blog post ideas.

The Topic Explorer, built on BuzzSumo’s database of more than 5 billion articles, offers social engagement data to further validate keywords.

BuzzSumo leverages machine learning to suggest topics that creators can rely on, without needing to spend time analyzing line after line of information.

Popular posts are those with the most relevance and engagement.

If you navigate to the Content Analyzer, using the button at the bottom right of the popup, you will see the most evergreen topics, or sort to see the topics with the most engagements by network.

Expand Your Audience With Related Blog Post Topics

Fundamentally, content marketing is a quest for site traffic.

We spend a lot of time thinking about how to get more people to visit websites.

One way to do this is to appeal to a wider audience.

If your traffic drops off, writing about a closely related idea may expand your reach to more users.

The example comparison below shows far less competition and more average social engagement for the topic “employee engagement” compared to “human resources”.

If my human resources site isn’t gaining traffic, employee engagement might be a good expansion topic.

How to position multiple ideas

With endless blog post ideas in mind, we’ll need to think about how we use blog content to increase – rather than dilute – the impact of our site. We will also need to design a logical path for users through our content.

Lee Odden, co-founder and CEO of TopRank Marketing, recommends a hub and spoke model or a power page approach.

Hub and spoke

In a hub and spoke model, tiers of supporting and related content connect to each other and drive readers toward the hub or central content piece.

Consider creating a best answer post as the centerpiece for this strategy.

Here’s an example for accounting software:

Use The Topic Explorer to chose the best spoke content and be sure you’ve covered every facet by looking at the suggested questions and asking if a customer would find a satisfactory answer on your site.

Power pages are based on a similar concept, but they place the supporting materials, primary topic and related resources all on the same page.

Lee illustrates the concept this way:

Whichever layout you choose, a blog idea file filled with related topics is a must to drive business goals.

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30dayfreetrial

Evergreen content consistently drives traffic, shares and backlinks to your website. It is a key part of any content strategy. 

In this post we look at:

• The definition of evergreen content
• The benefits of evergreen content
• How to find examples of evergreen content
• Tips for creating evergreen content

What Is Evergreen Content?

At its most basic, evergreen content stays relevant long past its publication date. This type of content takes its name from the evergreen trees, which retain their leaves throughout the seasons.

Key performance indicators for content that’s evergreen are a steady stream of backlinks, social shares and traffic. 

Most content is relevant for a short period of time. Even some articles that gain significant attention soon after they come online can see that interest decline quickly.

By contrast, evergreen content tends to be read and shared consistently over time.

Best Formats and Topics for Writing Evergreen Blog Posts

To keep audience attention for the long haul consider these formats:

Educational or informative posts. For example What is content marketing?

Practical posts. For example How to speak so that people want to listen

Research or statistical reference posts. For example Millennials Overtake Baby Boomers As America’s Largest Generation

Posts that answer questions. For example Frequently Asked Questions On Genetically Modified Foods

Lists and resources. For example The Ultimate List of Marketing Stats. This particular list is technically not evergreen as it is updated each year but it works well as an ongoing resource.

There are also topics that remain evergreen and relevant over time. These include:

• Love???
• Long life??
• Health?️‍♀️?️‍♀️
• Parenting???
• Career advice???

Remember, formats and topics can only take you so far.

Ultimately it’s the quality of the content that drives traffic. So, don’t rely on format alone. Marry format with laser-focus on meeting your audiences’ needs and offering them the best possible answer to their most pressing questions. 

What Are The Benefits of Evergreen Content?

Evergreen content drives traffic.

The main benefit of content designed to be evergreen is that it delivers a consistent stream of traffic to your site over time.

Evergreen posts stand out in your Google analytics or site traffic statistics. They are the posts that consistently bring visitors to your site month after month.

Evergreen posts are backlink magnets

These posts are very beneficial to your SEO strategy as they not only drive traffic, but they also gain links consistently over time. 

Backlinks function as a vote of confidence for search engines. When Google or another search engine wants to know if a piece of content is valuable, its bots will look for links from other authoritative sources.

Evergreen blog posts offer great value for the money

Because evergreen blog posts retain their relevance and keep working for your brand, they offer a cost-effective answer to increase the ROI of your content marketing.

Investing in evergreen content is like investing in a high-quality pair of shoes. You’ll spend more at the beginning, but save $$ over time.

How To Find Good Examples of Evergreen Content with BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo that allows you to search for good examples of evergreen content in any topic area or on any domain.

We look for articles that consistently gain shares and links over time. Based on this consistency we allocate each article an evergreen score.

In simple terms the higher the score the more evergreen the article. If an article is less than 40 days old we score it zero by default.

To compare your content with others who write about the same topics, check out these average evergreen scores.

This approach provides another perspective in the search for effective content examples.

Thus rather than sort by total shares or links, the evergreen filter shows the top posts that consistently gain shares and links over time.

Find Evergreen Content

Searching for evergreen content by topic

Simply enter the topic you want to search for and filter by evergreen score as shown below.

Searching for evergreen content by domain

You can also search for evergreen content on a particular website by entering the domain you want to search for rather than a topic.

Tips for Creating Content That Will Last

Kevan Lee, VP of Marketing at Buffer, offers in Evergreen Content Ideas: The Complete List For Your Blog. (The post itself is also a good example of an evergreen blog post.)

Kevan suggests these key elements:

• Be the definitive source. This means writing comprehensive long-form content where necessary. Our research consistently finds that authoritative, long-form content gains more links.
• Write for beginners, do not assume too much knowledge.
• I would add to this answering the questions your audience is asking. Lee Odden says it well: Be the best answer to your customers’ questions.”

You can use BuzzSumo’s Question Analyzer to research the questions being asked on a topic across hundreds of thousands of forums including Quora and Reddit, or tools like Answer the Public. Researching questions helps you to focus on the keywords used in relation to your topic.