How to Increase Your OpenCart Blog Traffic with Viral Topics
Small and medium online businesses without large budgets for marketing teams to drive traffic are often left in the dark. Low ranking, not much new visitors and even less sales.
It's 2017, everyone knows the power and importance of having a blog section in an E-Commerce store. The question is, how to really make it count and turn your blog into a traffic driving machine.
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Just think about the fact that 46% of your potential customers read blogs and reviews online before making a purchase. What if your store had the blog posts they need to make the purchasing decision?
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However, 80% of users don’t even read any content besides the headline. About 2 out of 10 people will actually read the entire thing.
What can we do to make more people click and read our blog posts?
By being useful and relevant of course. Today, we’ll talk about how to find the most trending and interesting topics to keep your blog contemporary and full of topics that are of real value to your readers.
You will find out what are the most useful channels and tools to use for finding relevant blog post topics and how to come up with unique ideas that are based on the current trends.
1. Google Trends
Use Google Trends to track the most popular phrases and keywords in your field. This tool tracks the interest around a certain subject based on how many times it has been Googled by users.
If the interest about a specific keyword or topic is increasing, then it’s a good idea to think of a blog post or two about it.
In this example, we searched for vinyl. As we can see from the graph, the interest about it has been steadily growing, with a big spike in the beginning of 2016.
You can determine whether interest about a specific topic is decreasing, increasing or it has been steady over time with various spikes and drops.
Use these ideas for generating blog post topics that will be interesting for readers based on data directly from Google.
2. Google Alerts
Setting up Google Alerts will help you get notifications as soon as someone makes a search about a specific keyword.
Enter the phrase, configure the details below and hit Create Alert. Now you will receive email notifications whenever any new content regarding the subject you’ve subscribed for.
Google Alerts helps you save time from always trying to be on top of all the new content that’s being published for your field.
This way, all the relevant content comes straight to your inbox where you can find inspiration for your new blog post topics.
3. Quora
Quora is the biggest Q&A community in the world. It’s one of our favorite sources of inspiration for new topics suitable for the iSenseLabs blog.
You can dig deep into what interests users the most by checking out what they are asking about. Find your areas of interest and scroll through the questions and answers.
For example, let’s look into the OpenCart topic. There are over 450 questions related to the platform and many of them are potential blog post topics.
Questions like “Which one is better, OpenCart and Magento?” or “What can I expect from OpenCart 3.0 as a developer?” are ideal blog post topics.
If you have been following our blog, you might have noticed that we’ve taken advantage of Quora and published a couple of articles on these topics here and here.
Another advantage of using Quora is that you can scan through the answers of all the questions and make sure that you cover the topic extensively and also write some unique content from an aspect that other people haven’t taken yet.
4. Reddit
The good old Reddit community, one of the most reliable sources of information around the world wide web.
If you’re not familiar with Reddit, it’s a place where the most recent news are being shared and the most relevant is upvoted to the top by the members. You can find detailed discussions on various topics and filter through the most interesting posts and find what people are most passionate about.
Reddit can also be used to find questions, since the users there often ask about popular opinion. For example, we went into the Vaping101 subreddit to see what vaping enthusiasts post about. If you sell vaping supplies and E-Cigarettes, you might find these very interesting.
Perfect opportunities for an authoritative figure to share some advice or simply take the topics and come up with a blog post that solves these pain points.
5. Analytics
Tracking your site’s data and the posts that generate the most traffic can give you a general direction about what interests your readers the most.
You can’t rely on Google Analytics for keyword data, but that doesn’t make the tool obsolete for finding the topics that will have the biggest impact for your site.
Go to BEHAVIOR > Site Content > All Pages.
You’ll find the most visited pages at the top. Look for the most viewed blog posts in your site and see if you can think of similar topics or spin the same topic from another perspective.
For example, one of our most viewed blog posts is “How to Install or Delete Modules in OpenCart?”
Why?
Well, it’s one of the basic steps of configuring an OpenCart store. Hence, it will be a question a lot of new users will be asking.
This gave us an idea for another topic - “How to Configure Modules and Assign them to Layouts in OpenCart”, which is basically the next step after the previous blog post.
Find your most viewed posts and see what ideas you can come up with based on that data.
6. Hashtags
Go through hashtags in popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. It might be a heavier load due to the sheer abundance of content you’ll have to scroll through, but it can give you contemporary and accurate ideas about your next blog post topic.
Check what people are posting about, what they’re passionate about and see if anything can give you an idea of a topic you understand and have something to say about.
Another clever thing to do is track what your competitors are posting about by looking into hashtags related to your sector.
Examples of Successful OpenCart Blogs
A while back, we made a compilation of OpenCart stores that rely on a blog for additional traffic, ranking, and brand recognition:
We’ll analyze a few of these examples and see the ideas behind the topics in their blog sections.
Bay Bloor Radio
Bay Bloor Radio is an audio store with a great passion for quality sound. They are committed to providing customers with a better way to experience their favorite music.
Their blog is home to tutorials such as “How to Clean a Turntable Needle” and ideas like “Designing a Home Entertainment System.”
These types of articles are always a winning strategy. Coming up with tutorials and creative ideas on how your products can be used is not that hard, especially when they are about the field you specialize in.
Another popular topic in E-Commerce blogs are product comparisons.
Examples here are “What is The Difference between Open-Back & Closed-Back Headphones?” or a comparison between two brands - “Comparing Sennheiser to Grado: Which Should You Buy?”
Customers often hesitate between similar products from different brands. If you have a handy comparison with more info they could use for their choice, you can convert much more because you save them the time for research in other websites or consulting with experts.
Marpac
Marpac is a brand that engineers and produces white noise sound machines. They specialize in providing customers with products that help with sleep. A great solution for young families with newborn children.
With articles like “6 Awesome Reasons White Noise Helps You Sleep Better”, they introduce the many benefits of their products and how they can help with something as vital as proper sleep.
Experiencing problems with sleep deprivation is getting more and more common and seeing a solution as simple as a blog post and pretty enticing for the tired parent. Hence one of the other articles - “The Top Four Reasons Parents Love White Noise.”
This is a blog topic that you can spin around in many ways. Basically, take the most key benefits of your product and list them as reasons why your customers would love its effect.
Ciaté London
Ciaté London is a makeup and cosmetics shop that present their products using attractive examples and ideas that readers and customers can experiment with.
With cosmetics, it’s all about what’s trending now and what are the latest looks that celebrities are setting. “Hot Right Now - Emily Blunt” is a perfect example of how to market content and products.
“Pretty, Fun & Fearless” is another article that aims to help readers with some type of frustration and making a choice. In this case, they talk about different styles, which to choose and can you actually combine them all together.
The style of this blog is bold and empowering for their subscribers. A topic like “No Makeup Makeup Essentials” challenges the status quo and shows how you can still use their products while embracing your natural beauty and going with a minimalist “less is more” approach.
A creative twist that entices you to click just to see what they have come up with.
Putting Them All to Work
Now that you have so many ways to come up with new topics and a few examples of how other stores are doing it, it’s time to get some work done. Your best bet is to cross them over.
For example, you’ve noticed a topic on Reddit that you can address by writing a post about it. You check the keywords in Google Trends and see what’s the interest. After examining the discussions on the topic in Reddit or Quora, you can make a conclusion about the right angle from which you can analyze the topic in a post.
