Article Topics - How to Rapidly Select and Expand an Article Topic

Have you ever looked for a long time at a blank screen hoping for an article topic to pop into your mind?

It is called writer's block. It happens to the best writers also.

4 top strategies for selecting article topics:

1. Choose a topic you are passionate about or are interested in.

If you try to write about something you are not familiar with you will have a difficult time creating the content for it.

2. Explore other resources

Once you have chosen an area to write about, visit online and offline locations where people visit who are also interested in those same topics. Online sources may include search engines, forums, blogs, article directories or join a discussion group.

Offline resources may include magazines (magazines.com), books (amazon.com), newspapers, journals and white papers.

After visiting some of these sources you will soon get an idea what to write about. Reading articles written by others will stimulate your writing juices. Everyone has there own unique writing style so don't copy anyone else's article. Uniquely written articles get read more often and rank higher in the search engines.

3. Keyword research

Before writing your article you need to research the keywords and keyword phrases people use to find information on that topic.

Use the free word tracker tool (freekeywords.wordtracker.com) to find the number of searches for that month.For example if you enter "dog grooming" in wordtracker it will display the top 100 keyword phrases out of 3,785 searches for that month.

4. Find related keywords

The Google adwords tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) generates a list of related keywords. Enter each of these related keywords into wordtracker. You will now have hundreds of topics (and sub-topics) you can write about.

Tip

Whenever you think of a new topic, jot it down for future reference, then when you get stuck for a subject you can refer back to this paper. It will save hours of your time deciding what to write about. You can also develop many articles simultaneously because you have already done the necessary topic preparation. Now you will no longer have to sit in front of a blank screen with a blank mind when searching for article topics.

Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW)
owner and author of Maryland Web Design

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