If you want to be heard, then answer the questions which are important to other people now on the...

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. This is Jim James sharing with you some tools and some tips around using technology as your agency, because in this day and age of AI, it's increasingly possible to create all manner of content— text, pictures, video, music— even using technology. And as a result, small companies, even one-person companies, can create an inordinate amount of content and amplify that. And that's all what we talk about on the Speak PR program. But one of the issues that many companies face is what to talk about in the first place. We get kind of tied up with talking about our own company, our own products, and then people go, what am I going to talk about next? So I want to talk about the importance of topics, moving away from details and products and moving into topics, because it's topics that drive narratives. And this is what can create great PR content. Content for you. Now, thinking of topics isn't necessarily that easy. Quite often we get siloed into a particular product or a technology. So what we can do is turn to a couple of technology platforms that will help to kind of unlock the mind, really. So I've been looking at how I can have, for example, one podcast and how I can use lateral thinking, um, the old de Bono concept of thinking aside and alongside a particular theme to get more articles. So I went online and had a look and found some tools, and I'm going to share with you a couple today. One of them is called Topic Seed, actually comes from the UK. And what you can do is you can put a keyword into Topic Seed, or you can put a URL into Topic Seed, and it'll analyze for you the, the content on that web page and give you some idea of the target keywords, the support keywords, the what they call the co-occurrences, questions, and then content ideas. So let's just go through that. Now, I put in the article which came from a podcast that I did with Stylianos Kempakis, who is— or Dr. Stylianos, who's an expert data scientist on the use of AI. This is great conversation, and I wanted to follow that up really with what could be another topic around AI. So my headline is, how can AI create marketing content for you now quickly and cost-effectively? That is the, the article that came as a result of working through the headline analyzer tool that I've also talked about that would give me a high ranking. So What the Topic Seed platform does for free is it gives me then a number of analysis.

I'll go through those with you.

First of all, it says that the article is targeting data science, which is absolutely right.

And target keywords are the terms you want to rank your blog post for.

So everything in and around data science is what we're going to be talking about in that blog post. Now, of course, that's only relevant then if it's something I'm trying to sell or market or position myself as an expert in. So as it says, if data science is not the keyword that I want this article to be known for, then I'm going to need to go back and change that. If it is, I can increase the word density. Now there are a number of supporting keywords which are scattered through the article, include data strategy, data format, computer science, data science adoption, expert data scientist. So these are not the keywords, but if you like, these are the ones that create some context And these are the ones that search engines use to create relevance and to show how comprehensive the blog post is.

In other words, if a blog post is only full of keywords, then it's been SEO-written only and won't be very good for the, for the reader itself. Now, what Topic Seed include, which I hadn't heard of before, was the co-occurrence. And this is where they talk about search engine optimization using latent semantic indexing keywords, or words that co-occur. In other words, these are words that appear next to or around the keywords. So again, they're around the, the context of the subject, and they analyze the co-occurrences or these semantic indexing keywords. And they've listed those, for example, data visualization Big data, datasets, data analytics, data-driven, artificial intelligence, skill sets, and so on. So it's finding a number, in fact, of pairs of words or expressions that when those are within the article, they're adding validity to the content. Okay, now what you can do, of course, is to add more of those if you want to. Now what it's done, which I think is where the value is, it's given us 355 questions that humans, real people, have searched for online that include these keywords and co-occurrence words. So for example, they've given us, are data science degrees worth it? Are data science jobs in demand? Are data science jobs competitive? There's 355.

I'm not going to read them all out to you, but you get the idea.

And of course, they don't all hinge on data science. As you move down the list, then they start to work on these other words around data science, AI. For example, um, when did data science become a big thing?

Now obviously not all of these are going to be relevant for my business, but it gives me 355 thoughts that could become a topic for an article.

So these are the questions, and then what it's doing is it's saying, um, here are some content ideas. In, in this particular case, it's saying my content is too short, although it's 1,600 words. But what I could do, and if I signed up, I could add multiple words and multiple links, and then it will start to give me more ideas for the kind of podcasts or blog posts that I could be writing that are relevant to my keywords. So Topic Seed is one tool that you can use where you put in your content, it'll find related content.

Another one is called Answer the Public. .com, where you can have a number of searches per day, free searches. I used up my limit yesterday, but you can have a pro plan if you like. And again, in here, what it's doing is it's enabling you to put in keywords and it will find out related subjects that are being written about or being asked about. And of course, if you know what people are asking. If you write an article that responds to that, then your content is likely to be picked up and to trend. Now, what Answer the Public does nicely is it does a very nice visualization of all the different terms and keywords that are related to your keywords and your co-occurrences. So that's another, another plan that you can use there called Answer the Public.

Now in terms of pricing, if I come back to the Topic Seed, these are not, not free once you move on to a larger volume. But for example, for the Freelancer on Topic Seed, it's $90 per month and you can choose 100,000 words per month. I've actually already used up quite a few words, I think even just in my in my own, but you can do topic graphs, content graphs, group analysis questions. Okay, you can also then have document interpretation. You can have, um, if you upgrade, you can have sentiment analysis as well.

Now for Answer the Public, that's $99 a month, so similar. There's an annual plan at $79 per month, so you pay $948 upfront, and therefore you can do unlimited searches, unlimited users, and compare data over time. And of course you can export the data to a CSV file, which is very helpful as well. Now there are a couple of others. Wiki— the WikiBrowser also has one, and it's called WikiBrowser. So you can start to have a look on the Questions Ninja. It's questions.ninja.com, and that will also allow you to pick keywords and show related questions that are being asked on the internet and answer questions then on your blog or on your social media, which are basically then creating kind of a real-time Quora Q&A style session for you. And again, Questions.ninja is free for their plan, which is, um, what they call anonymous. So you don't get a full volume of data searching, and you get a limited number of daily requests. And, um, you can for only $19.99 per month get unlimited requests, unlimited what they call rate limiting, and you have some views of tables and some charts. So the Questions.ninja is plainly the cheapest of those 3, but they all add a lot of value. I personally have been looking for something a little less fully featured because at $90 a month, it's quite a lot for my personal use.

But this idea of using an alternative to the Google Keywords and using one of these platforms is appealing. Google Keywords will also tell you for free what people are looking for on the Google search. What these tools do though is also give you some prescriptive ideas and some associations and some very nice charting as well. So when we're thinking about writing articles and generating content which is going to be an infographic or a blog or a press release, it's quite easy to get tired and run out of ideas. These platforms like Questions Ninja, like Topic Seed, like Ask the People will give you guidance on what new words and what are trending, and maybe also take you from one place to the next. Now, Tony Buzan, uh, who worked on mind mapping invented mind mapping, had an offline way of doing this that I learned years and years ago, which is what we call radial thinking and linkage thinking. And I'll tell you these, they're not online, but these are ones that I remember taking a course on. So radial thinking is where you put something in the middle, a topic, a word, and then you, like a sunflower, draw and write a word related to that. Radial— that's radial thinking. Linkage thinking is where you put one word and you go to the next place to where that takes you, and then you go to the second word and you see where that takes you, and you go to the second word and you go to a third word. And what happens is that in radial thinking, each word is directly, directly related to that first word, but in linkage thinking Each word is a step away from the original word, and that's an old-fashioned way. Of course, it doesn't tell you what people are searching for online, but it does give you a fun way of creating new ideas of what to write about.

So thank you so much for listening to this episode of Speak PR.

I'm here to help anybody that's got value locked up in their organization use technology as their agency and their guide, especially as we enter a full lockdown here in the UK. Getting to see our team members is going to be harder. We're going to be doing more work on our own. Technology is there to build a bridge for all of us. So thank you so much for listening. If you're interested in the Speak PR program, which is to storify, personalize, engage, amplify, and know, please head over to speakpr.co. And all the information is there. Thank you for listening to this podcast. Please do subscribe, give it a rating if you're enjoying it, share it with anybody that you know that would like to get more information about how to get noticed for free using technology. My name is Jim James. Thank you for listening. I hope that you are in good health and that your business is surviving, or even better, thriving. And that if you're looking for something to write or make a video about, that you check out one or two of these tools that will give you some guidance and some inspiration during lockdown. Okay, thanks very much indeed and catch you next time.