Toolbox Saturday: Using Topic Buckets to Create Better Content

You’re at a conference (pretend it’s 2019 back when we went to conferences), and you’re leaving the breakfast area to go up to the 3rd floor where the session you want to attend is about to start. A guy runs on the elevator with you and you both are on your way.  He asks what your company does. Now what do you say?  What are the 3 or so things that your company does that you would mention to this stranger? What do you want your company to be known for?

Those are your topic buckets.  Those are the areas you should focus on when you create content. Typically it’s best to pick around 3 areas that relate to your company, that you want to be associated with your company.

For instance, I have three main topic buckets for my content here; Customer experience, customer service/support, and customer loyalty. I want every piece of content I create to touch on at least one of those areas or buckets.

By using this system it makes it much easier to not only create a content calendar for your blog, it also makes it much easier for you to focus your content. The more defined your content is, the easier it will be for your readers to understand what you are writing about AND it will be much easier for search engines to understand what content identifies with your site.

For instance, when someone asks you “Hey what’s a good site to learn about Chinese cooking?”, then you will point them toward sites or blogs that you know cover Chinese cooking.  When someone goes to a search engine and asks “How do I get started with Chinese cooking?”, the search engine will point that person toward the website that it thinks best answers that question. In other words, it will be a site devoted to Chinese cooking.

Topic buckets can also help you fill and set your content calendar.  Let’s say you have committed to writing three new posts a week on your blog. If you have three Topic Buckets you want to focus on, then simply write a post for each Topic Bucket, once a week! Bam, three posts a week!  You can follow this schedule and over time you can track the performance of the posts in each Topic Bucket.  You may find that the posts in one of your Topic Buckets usually perform much better than the other two. This is likely a sign that your readers want to see more from you on that topic.  So you can adjust your content schedule, maybe write two posts a week from that Topic Bucket, then rotate your third post between the two remaining Topic Buckets.

I love using Topic Buckets because I am all about anything that simplifies the content creation process. Anything that we, as content creators, can do to create good content, faster, I’m all for it! Hope using Topic Buckets helps you with your content creation efforts! Have a great weekend, see you on Monday!