How do you validate your content ideas?

1 Why validate your content ideas?

Validating your content ideas is a crucial step in the online content creation process. It helps you avoid wasting time and money on topics that no one cares about, or that have been covered extensively by others. It also helps you align your content with your goals, your audience's needs, and your niche's trends. By validating your content ideas, you can increase your chances of creating content that attracts, engages, and converts your ideal customers.

2 How to research your audience's pain points and interests

To validate your content ideas, the first step is to understand what your audience wants and needs from your content. Research their pain points, challenges, goals, and interests by surveying customers with tools like Google Forms or SurveyMonkey, analyzing website and social media analytics to see what topics, keywords, and formats perform well, reading online reviews and feedback from your audience or similar products/services, joining online communities where your audience engages with each other, and interviewing them through email, phone, or video calls. Doing so can help you create content that resonates with your audience.

3 How to use online tools to generate and validate content ideas

Once you have an understanding of your audience's wants and needs, you can use online tools to generate and validate content ideas. For example, BuzzSumo allows you to search for the most popular and shared content on any topic or domain, so you can discover what types of content, headlines, and formats are successful in your niche. AnswerThePublic can help you uncover questions your audience is asking online about any topic, while Ubersuggest lets you analyze the search volume, difficulty, and trends of any keyword or topic. Lastly, Quora provides access to thousands of questions and answers on any topic, so you can uncover trending topics, unanswered questions, and insights from your audience.

4 How to test your content ideas with minimum viable content

The final step in validating your content ideas is to test them with minimum viable content (MVC). This small piece of content can be a blog post outline, a video script, a podcast episode, or any other format that suits your idea. The purpose of MVC is to get feedback from your audience before investing more time and resources into creating the full content. To do this, you can share it with a small group of existing or potential customers and ask for their honest opinions and suggestions. You can also publish it on your website, social media, or email list and measure its performance in terms of views, clicks, shares, comments, and conversions. Additionally, you can run ads or campaigns to drive traffic to your MVC and see how well it attracts and engages your target audience. By testing your content ideas with MVC, you can validate or invalidate them based on real data and feedback. This will help you decide whether to proceed with creating the full content, tweak or pivot your idea, or discard it altogether.

5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?