Articles (and blog posts) are crucial if you’re building a business on the web. Not only can they help fill up your sites with content your readers will want, they can also be submitted to a variety of directories to help promote your website. But sometimes the mental well runs dry and you just can’t think of anything worthwhile to write about. 

The good news is that, as long as you’re writing to fill a need in your target market, there are loads of ideas just waiting to be discovered. And, by finding out exactly what your customers are looking for, your articles will be all the more successful.  Knowing where to look for ideas can make all the difference between beating your head off the keyboard in frustration and happily typing away on your next great article (or blog post).

Here are some article marketing research tips to get you started…

• Yahoo Answers: I highly recommend you take a look at Yahoo Answers. Start searching for certain terms related to your website, and you’ll find people asking all kinds of questions. Why not answer some of these questions in your article?
• Keyword Research: You could also visit the Google Keyword Research tool to find some keywords related to your niche. Keep browsing through related phrases until you find something that gets a good few hundred searches to write about.
• Research the Competition: You can even take a look at what articles your competitors are writing about on Ezine Articles. You might notice something they left out, and take this as your opportunity to fill the gaps and target hungry customers.
• Read: Reading from other sources can help you come up with more ideas than you would have expected. Read the newspaper and you’ll probably have lots of ideas already, or browse a few blogs etc. to find more.  You can also find timely, viral topics to write about that can generate a lot of traffic quickly.  My recent blog post, a case study on the perfect way to respond to negative social posts, is an excellent example.  I ran across an article about the response, which had gone viral.  I wrote a quick blog posts and generated over 100 hits on that single article within 24 hours.  The info was sound and of interest to my audience and the topic was trending everywhere.  It was a win-win for everyone.
• Write What You Know: Lastly, you always have knowledge of a subject that you can pass on to others. Think of a title such as ‘Top 10 Ways to Write Articles’ and you’ll find you know more than you thought as you brainstorm. Even better, internet readers love these kind of articles!
• Google Alerts: If you regularly write articles around a similar topic, I’d also recommend that you subscribe to alerts on a service such as Google Reader or Google News. That way, you’ll never be short of new sources to find inspiration from!

When you are noting down what you’ve found, please realize that you’re not going to be copying from any of these sources, or even simply rewriting them, in your article. Rather you should be noting down broad points, tips, pieces of information, that you can then use to outline your article.

Make sure you use a few different sources to keep your article interesting, and to ensure that you get a balanced view of the topic you’re writing about.

These article marketing research ideas may sound simple, but when you’re short on ideas, simply going through this list can give you more article topics than you need!