How to Turn a Hot Topic Into an Article with Enduring Interest in Five Simple Steps

Hot Topics, those keywords with currently spiking Interest in the Search Engines, are a rich source of article content. But due to their nature, they change with alarming speed. Here’s a simple plan to help you identify hot topics with enduring interest, and find the best keywords to use as tags for them. It’ll also help you discover what your readers are really looking for and write quality content for them.

1. Finding the Hot Topics

If you are registered with Triond, the 25 Top Hot Topics can be found in the Submit section of the site, under Hot Topics. If you are not registered, or can’t find a suitable topic in the top 25, you can go to Google Trends and find the full list of 100 of Google’s currently spiking search terms. This list consists largely of Celebrity names and references to news events. Great if you’re a confident commentator on celebrities and current events. Even if you’re not, though, browsing through the list will usually turn up one or two possibilities. And it’s updated every hour, so there’s never too long to wait

Walking through this step, the current top 25 Hot Toppics provide two possibilites (16th September 2009) “body bug” at 18 and “homecoming” at 20. So now we have two potential keywords for article content, let’s do a little research to find out if either of them provide a good hook for a current article that will have enduring qualitites.

Incidently, if you have an article idea already, you can follow the next four steps with your chosen keyword to decide the best way to angle your article.

2. Checking for Enduring Qualities

Having picked a likely keyword or two, we’re going to doing a little quick research to help us frame our article content in such a way it will provide the information our target audience are searching. To do that, we’re going to visit another useful Google gadget, Google Insight, and enter our search terms here.

Google returns a line graph, giving a visual representation of interest ion the search term over time, currently from 2004 onwards.

Using our two examples, “body bug” appears to be a low interest search term, but with steadily increasing interest following an aberrant spike in January 2009. “Homecoming” on the other hand, is a mid level interest term with high interest annual spikes towards the end of September every year. Interest looks likely to peak in the next few days, so there’s still time to get a good article out and benefit from this seasonal interest this year. Plus there’s always the possibility of receiving traffic next year when interest starts to spike again.

So with “homecoming” as our chosen keyword, how do we decide the best focus for our article?

3. Looking at Sub Search Yerms

Well, fortunately, Google Insight goes some way to answering that question for us to. Scroll down the page and you will find a section labelled “Search Terms” with two columns. On the left, a bar chart listing the top 10 related searches or sub search terms. These search terms give us a better idea of what our potential readers are looking for. Here we see that “homecoming dresses” are the most popular topic, followed closely by “silent hill homecoming.” Other posibilities exist, but with much lower interest.

On the right, under “Rising searches” Google lists the 10 fastest rising interest search terms related to our keyword. The term “breakout” appears next to a term with interest more than 5000% in the last measurable period than the previous one. “silent hill homecoming” is a breakout search term, whereas “homecoming dresses” does not appear on this second list. Two other breakout terms of interest are “homecoming 2009″ and “youtube homecoming”

This provides two distinct article possibilities. One  focusing on the keyword “homecoming dresses”and “homecoming 2009″ could be an article rounding up the best homecoming dresses for 2009. Another, using the terms “silent hill homecoming” and “youtube homecoming” could review the Silent Hill Homecoming game with links to relevant youtube videos. 

4. Researching the Content

Of course at this point, we don’t even know whether those relevant videos exist, so the fist point of call in this instance would be youtube. Also, it wouldn’t be fair to review a game you’re not familiar with, and I’m not familiar with the Silent Hill franchise, so from here on we’ll be concentrating on the “homecoming dresses 2009″ prospect.

The quickest way to get your research started is to go back to Google Trends and click on the search term, in this case homecoming and you will see the current search results for “News” “Blog” and “Web” that your readers will be seeing. In many cases, following these links and compiling the relevant information will give you the bones of a good article. In this case it’s all a bit off topic for us. read through the results, copying and pasting any good quotes, and m aking notes of any points that you want to cover, being careful to cite the sources for your quotes. The best way is to cpoy and paste the website link at the same time, so you don’t accidentaly credit the wrong source.

Next, go to a straight Google search and enter your more specific keywords. Continue adding to your framework with quotes and points to expand on. Also, copy the links to any pictures you want to use in your article, being careful not to breach copyright.

In this instance, we could be looking for a few quotes about current fashion trends for homecoming dresses, with regard to colour, style etc. But we’d be looking for pictures of these as well.

5. Writing Your Article

Add in references to off line information and any of your own photos. Also consider video content and anything else that will add to your article. Then arrange the quotes, points and other references into a sequence that makes sense. In the case of the “homecoming dresses 2009″ article, we might look at a general introduction outlining the current fashion trends followed by a Top Ten countdown with pictures and brief commentary on the most popular designers and dress styles. We might wrap this up with links to a couple of sites that let you design your own dress, or even sites that offer express delivery for those last minute shoppers.

Now you have the bones of your article, and you know where it’s going and the points you want to make, you can fill it out in your own words.  Try to use your relevant keywords scattered throughout the article, but don’t go mad, there is too much of a bad thing.

Once you’ve got your article written, add the keyword tags, write a good description and think of a catchy, descriptive title, and submit your article. Then promote it to suitable sites to make the most of your efforts. After all, you don’t your work to go to waste and your readers not find your thoughtful piece.