3 Ways to Get Blog Writing Ideas From Your Competitors

So you’re having trouble coming up with writing ideas for your blog? Typically I recommend using your own blog analytics to find out what’s currently working for you and start there. But maybe you’ve already exhausted that data or you have a newer blog that doesn’t have much to work with. In this cases you don’t really have much of your own data to analyze. By using a few free online tools you can take a peek at what type of content is working the best for your competitors. This can give you some great ideas when it comes to writing your own blog posts.

1. Which blog post are getting the most tweets?

One of my favorite twitter tools is topsy. It’s a real-time search engine that uses twitter and Google+. It’s basically like twitter search but I find the way it allows you to filter through the results more valuable. Yeah twitter, you heard me… your search feature could use some work. Here’s how you can use topsy to find out which of your competitors blog posts are getting the most tweets…

Step 1: Visit Topsy.com
Step 2: Enter your competitors domain.
Step 3: Select Search > Links & Past 30 Days from side navigation. This will only show tweets that contain links from the past 30 days. By doing the past 30 days it helps you identify content that is popular now. I think it’s more important to look at what people are sharing now.
Step 4: Now just look at which blog posts have the most shares.

If you find this too complicated I recommend trying http://mytoptweet.com/. You’ll first need to create an account, but once you’re in simply enter your competitors twitter name and it will return the most popular tweets. Now the only downside is you can’t filter it by a certain time-frame and this will include all tweets so it makes it a little hard to identify their blog posts tweets.

2. Which blog posts are important from Google’s perspective?

If your goal is better rankings then who better to ask which of your competitors posts are most important than Google. Though these few simple search commands you can do just that.

Step 1: visit Google.com (duh)
Step 2: ENTER: site:competitor.com/blog/ inurl:competitor.com
Step 3: You should now have a list of their most popular blog posts according to Google.

You can now use Google’s search tools to further filter the results.

3. What blog posts are getting the most links?

You now know your competitors most popular blog posts according to tweets and Google ranking but what about their posts that have the most/best backlinks? Easy…

Using MajesticSEO.com:

Step 1: Enter your competitors domain. (use fresh index for past 60 days or historic for all time)
Step 2: Select the “pages” tab.
Step 3: I recommend exporting the data to CSV so you can sort it in anyway you wish.

Using opensiteexplorer.org:

Step 1: Enter your competitors domain.
Step 2: Select the “top pages” tab.
Step 3: Just like MajesticSEO’s data I recommend exporting the data to CSV so you can sort it in anyway you wish.

There you have it… you now I have your competitors best content based on links, tweets and Google rankings. You now know what’s working best for them and can start thinking of similar content you can produce yourself to generate similar results. If you have other ways to identify what’s working for competitors I’d love to hear them!