You want to write about something that is not only useful but also attractive. And most importantly, it must allow you to connect with your audience as well.

It is so easy to get lost in the length of content you’re trying to dissect, according to this post from Moz, but what you need in order to identify blog post ideas that will allow you to connect with your audience is an actionable and simple process that is easily repeatable, applicable to any industry and also scalable.

Gather your Data. This is the Most Important Part. Don’t Skip it!

Focus only on gathering the most important data that’s relevant to your goal.

Here’s the data that you will need:

1. Your own most popular posts

You don’t need to go through all your previous posts, just select the most popular ones and use Google Analytics to identify the blog posts that have had the most significant traffic, the most conversions and the most engaged visits.

Keep only the top 20% of them.

Most shared posts on social networks

Again, only keep the top 20% of them.

After gathering the data, consolidate these two “Top 20%” lists, eliminate the duplicates, and create a spreadsheet with the following information for each post:

• URL
• Title
• Visit duration
• Conversions
• Shares in each social network (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.)
• Visits

Now that you know which posts have been your most popular content to date, you should have a better idea of to post on social networks along with the social networks your audience prefers.

2. Find your Competitor’s Most Popular Posts and See What you Can Learn From Them

Collect the most popular posts from your competitors, and although you don’t likely have access to their full analytics, you can still identify some important information:

• Most shared posts on social networks
• Most externally linked posts

With this information you can consolidate these two lists into one and create a spreadsheet for the top 20% of posts by your competitors that should include the following:

• URL
• Title
• External links
• Shares in each social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.)
• Linking domains

Now that you have the most popular blogs from your competitors in your archive, it should be a lot easier to figure out what topics you should post about next.

3. Your Influencer’s Most Shared Content

Whose blogs do you read? Whose blogs do you often get inspiration from?

Create a list with the top content shared in your influencers’ top tweets and divide it using the different topic areas identified for your communities. Complete it with social and search popularity-related data for each one of them:

• URL
• Title
• Linking domains
• Shares in each social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.)
• External links

This should help spark shareable blog post ideas for social media.

4. The Hot Topics on Social Networks

Download the most shared content in social networks for each category and create a list with the following information:

• URL
• Title
• Content type
• Shares in each social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.)

Next, consolidate the lists, dividing them up into categories and organizing them by prioritizing the overall best performing content for your topics in social networks.