ContentStudio’s Free Tool To Discover Trending Content Ideas

Back in 2018, your invaluable feedback and our itch to help you deliver personalized content to your audience – coupled with lots of coffee – led us to create the Content Discovery feature.

Fast-forward to 2022, and we come bearing gifts: a free tool like the Content Discovery feature that helps you find niche content and source proven-to-work content ideas.

Meet ContentIdeas, the Google search engine on steroids, dedicated to sourcing winning content ideas.

The best part? It doesn’t require email, log-in, or credit card details. Simply plug in your keywords or key phrases and get the ball rolling.

Let’s show you how it works, unveil its backstory, and highlight who can make the most of this FREE tool.

On we go:

The Backstory: How ContentIdeas came to be?

This free tool’s backstory has roots in the Content Discovery feature of our flagship tool, ContentStudio.

We came up with the discovery tool to make it super simple for you to share more relevant content on social media. The ultimate goal? To help you engage your audience better and grow your business.

As a solution to this, we built Content Discovery to allow you to source trending content pieces. The interesting bit? Content Discovery doesn’t just pull up any results when you search for a keyword.

Instead, the feature helps you find niche content on well over 500 topics.

It also lets you refine your query. Meaning: you can source content on a specific topic from a specific source. In fact, if there are particular sources you might not want to source ideas from, you can flag them, and the feature won’t show ideas from those sources.

 

Now that we’ve briefly recapped Content Discovery’s potential let’s get you familiar with ContentIdeas, which is basically the discovery tool except its free to use for everyone – whether you’re a ContentStudio user or not.

Yep, you read that right!

The tool’s free for everyone — free-forever! 

This way, you now have powerful free software in your toolkit that’ll help you source content ideas to fuel your content and social media marketing. 

Discover and analyze top-performing content in your niche for free

ContentIdeas can help you in a ton of ways – you’ll realize this pretty quickly as you read through this post. For now, let’s walk you through the basic ways of how using this free tool will help you:

1. Research over a billion web pages with social metrics

We aim to make the search easy for you. It’s why in the homepage itself, you’ll see that we’ve created multiple content categories to make exploring ideas a piece of cake.

 

 

But a thorough google search can turn up mostly the same results, right? Nope. 
We’ve dubbed ContentIdeas as the “google search engine on steroids” for a reason. That is: besides turning in a variety of web pages on a particular keyword, the results are pre-analyzed so you can get your hands on winning content ideas

Here’s how: each result comes with two unique indicators – both geared toward showing you how the audience is reacting to the pieces. These are:

a. Sentiment analysis

Using an emoji face, this indicator tells you the emotions each content piece is evoking. This is helpful for filling your content calendar with audience-relevant ideas and pitching hard-to-turn-down ideas for PR purposes.
For instance, you can pick up an idea that’s driving more positive sentiment among your broad target audience.

You can also use the sentiment analysis for writing on-point, audience-resonating captions on social media. If you’re sharing the curated content in your newsletter or a blog post, you’ll be able to write better comments.

b. Social metrics

This indicates each piece’s virality nature. One look, and you can tell how well the audience is receiving the content on social media.

Again, this helps you pick out content to curate and share that has the potential of garnering the most engagement.

2. Filter the results to find what you need

With ContentIdeas, you aren’t bound to the results the idea search engine pulls out. Instead, you can apply as many filters as you like.
For example, search by domain, author name, multiple keywords, exact phrase, and more.
This refines your search process, helping you pin down pieces industry leaders and competitors are publishing.

3. Reverse engineer your competitor’s content marketing strategy

Using filters, limit your search to unearthing content that your competitors are publishing.

With the results you get, make notes on the topics they’re covering, the engagement that the content is getting on social, and the emotions it’s tugging at

This will give you a full breakdown of your competitors’ content marketing strategy— studying, which is an important step when planning or auditing your content strategy.

4. Find related topics in your niche

And finally, you can use ContentIdeas for inspiration and spark your creativity.
For this, pay attention to the suggestions the search bar makes when you type in a keyword. These are suggestions of related topics that you might be interested in. Use them to identify potential topic ideas worth publishing on your blog or talking about on social media.

But why bother using ContentStudio’s free content ideas search tool for blog topics?

Good question.
 Here’s the thing: without this tool, you’re probably going to be conducting manual research. This can be time-consuming and inefficient – after all, it’s possible you miss trending ideas. 

Not to mention, your research will most probably be based on guesswork on exactly how people are responding to the content. Sure, you can look up each piece’s performance in a separate tool, but that would only add work to your plate, wouldn’t it?

The solution: ContentIdeas – a one-stop solution for not just surfing content ideas but surfing refined content ideas that are doing incredibly well among your audience.

Who needs to use ContentIdeas?

Now for who can benefit from this free idea surfer? Lots of people. Here are some, for example:

1. Bloggers

Folks looking to publish audience-relevant content on their blogs can use ContentIdeas for identifying high-potential topic ideas.

2. Social media users

This includes social media managers as well as personal brands and small business owners running their social channels. Type in keywords and source trending content pieces that are likely to drive engagement.

3. Email newsletter writers

Email copywriters or simply anyone running a newsletter and sharing curated content in it can use this free tool. Explore inspiring ideas to talk about, as well as links to share in your emails.

4. Content creators

This includes people who’ve got a knack for curating content. For instance, you can create a Twitter thread featuring the top 7 trending pieces on AI or whatever your niche is.

5. Content managers or small business owners handling their content production

Read through topics that get the most engagement around the web. Doing so will help you:

a. Understand what makes good content.

The more pieces you study, the more you’ll start noting that there’s a pattern to the elements that all high-performing content pieces show.

b. Source content ideas to add to your editorial calendar.

In fact, you can also identify high-quality resources to link to within your content. And in your briefs to writers, you can add some of these relevant pieces for inspiration and research on the topic at hand.

6. PR professionals

Identify which topics are trending and well-received to pitch story ideas to target sites.

ContentIdeas – Use-cases

While you can use this easy-to-use tool any way you like when it comes to finding content ideas, here’s a rundown of some very helpful use cases:

1. Find authority websites for building backlinks

Type in search terms related to topics you’d want to get featured in. Then, look at the source of the pieces that show up.

Next, download the URLs of these pieces in an Excel sheet. This will give you fodder for high authority websites to reach out to for your link-building campaign.

With the sheet ready, all you have to do is use an email verification tool to find out emails of contacts and reach out to them with your link request

2. Turn product mentions into backlinks

Some more help with link building – this works pretty much the same way as above. Except, use ContentIdeas to search for product review sites and listicles that round up products. 

Then, reach out to the folks behind them with the request to link to/review your product too.

3. Competitor analysis

To this end, apply filters to search content on particular topics or related keywords from your competitors.
Study the pieces that the ideal search engine pulls up to understand your competitors’ content strategy.
By taking the time to review each piece, you can also determine the strengths and weaknesses of their content. This, in turn, assists you in identifying ways to make your content better and more audience-relevant.

4. Content ideation

Whether you’re an agency owner running content for multiple clients or a small business owner, use this tool to source content ideas.Start with surfing ideas in your niche to get a general idea of what sort of topics are being covered. From there, enter specific keywords in the search bar to find out what content is being created to target those keywords. 

In fact, you can read a handful of pieces on a single topic and create outlines for your briefs based on questions covered in them.
Heads-up: this doesn’t mean you copy-paste sections and regurgitate what’s already covered. Instead, get an idea of the angle these trending pieces take, the format they follow, and the content they’re writing to create your own unique outlines

Find the best content ideas using the right search terms

Wondering how to get your hands on the best content ideas using the right search terms? The short answer: use filters in ContentIdeas.

Simply tap on the help icon by the search bar. This will unroll a drop-down menu showing you the variety of filters at your disposal.

Note that these filters allow you to search not just by one keyword but multiple keywords and/or exact phrases. You can also source work from specific sites and authors.

Not to forget, you also have the flexibility to remove results that aren’t relevant to your search.

Let’s say you’re searching for social media marketing. Get specific by sourcing content ideas by the author and/or particular sites such as the Social Media Examiner. You can also break the keyword and search using key terms such as social OR media OR marketing (remember to use the operator OR for this).

_{Bonus tip: Search based on whatever timeframe you prefer. Pick from sourcing ideas from the past month, year, or any preference}

 

In the same way, you can search for ideas based on whichever social media platform your audience uses the most. In the image above, for instance, the results are sorted by Twitter shares. You can change that to Pinterest, Instagram, or another network’s shares.

ContentIdeas helps with content curation

Content curation involves collating and sharing content on a specific theme or topic.

For instance, you can curate a list of helpful resources on writing headlines – share it both on your blog or social media.

Preparing such curated lists manually, however, is never easy. It takes a lot of time to identify the gems. Fortunately, with ContentIdeas, you can speed up the process.

Simply search using the right keywords, domain names, and more, and you’ll get the results within minutes.

Start using ContentIdeas today!

Whether you’re an agency owner or a content manager, you’ll find ContentIdeas is a powerful, reliable, and easy tool to add to your stash.

Use it for content ideation, link building, content curation, competitor analysis, and filling up your social media posting calendar.

Do all of this and much more without sharing your log-in or credit card details. So what are you waiting for? Start exploring more content ideas for free today.