Find Hot New Industry Trends With This Powerful Content Writing Tool

If you haven't heard of Buzzsumo, you're missing out on one of the most powerful content marketing tools out there.

Buzzsumo shows you what content has gotten the most social shares for just about any topic.

Plus, you can also check out how your competitors' content is performing, giving you ideas for how you can outdo them.

While it is a subscription service, they do offer a 30 day free trial.

You can take advantage of this to do some research to inform your own content strategy, even if you're hesitant about paying monthly.

One of Buzzsumo's most useful applications is finding trending topics.

While evergreen content is a must-have for any brand's content strategy, there's also a lot to be said for creating content that's timely and on-trend.

You can get an edge over your competition by hopping on trends while they're just starting to pick up.

In a recent post at Quicksprout, Neil Patel details how to use Buzzsumo to find trending topics.

You can tell which topics are trending in your industry

Evergreen content is definitely important and serves its purpose.

In particular, I’m a fan of long-form evergreen pieces.

But as good as evergreen content is, it’s also important to cover the hot topics trending right now.

This is especially true for fast-moving niches like news and politics.

Striking while the iron is hot is a surefire way to bring attention to your brand and grow your audience.

And it just so happens that BuzzSumo is perfect for determining which topics are trending in your industry.

All it takes is a quick search.

You first want to go to your dashboard and filter by a recent date.

I usually look at content from the previous week, but a month or even 24 hours can work as well, depending on your industry.

Click on the filter you want to use:

[image source: Quicksprout]
Type in your keyword:

[image source: Quicksprout]
Now click “Search.”

[image source: Quicksprout]
Within seconds, I can see which topics are trending and the number of shares each piece of content has received:

[image source: Quicksprout]
The more engagement content receives, the more interested I am in it because people are obviously responding to it favorably.

I know for a fact this content is resonating with my audience at this particular moment.

If I create a similar post or skyscraper it, I’ve got a good chance of getting positive results.

And believe me, this beats the heck out of manually scouring the Internet, trying to figure out what’s working.

Going that route is incredibly arduous and labor intensive.

It also involves too much guesswork for my taste.

By using BuzzSumo, I know for sure what’s trending and have access to several helpful metrics, which means I’m basing my findings on concrete data—not just a hunch.