Darren Rowse over at Problogger is running a 31-day challenge to us bloggers to submit some tips we’ve learned while practicing this craft. Here is my contribution:

We are a multi-blog household. My wife blogs on hair for women. This morning she faced her first exposure to writers block. Up till now she has written off the top of her head without any real strategy on where to find the buzz, news, product announcements, gossip etc. The net result is her blog is not very newsy and she does not post nearly often enough. She asked me for advice on how to tune in to the grapevine in her niche. She wants to make her blog a must read for her readers. Here was my advice:

Become a reporter rather than a writer. Many bloggers fail because they think their job is to write compelling content. If you can do that, more power to you, but the rest of us mortals need to find sources of content other than the self. Lets face it folks, the visitor to your blog could care less who the author of your content is. They are quite self-absorbed and are only interested in; do you have an answer for the issue they woke up struggling with that day? Sorry, gang they don’t go out looking for pretty prose. They are looking for answers and hyperlinks to other sources of information will do just fine thank you.

If you look closely at the top dogs in the blogging industry you will find very little of their content was internally generated. What makes them great bloggers is they become very good at finding the nooks and crannies where hot niche tidbits lurk in cyberspace. They are very liberal in giving attribution and usually a small teaser of the content and a hyperlink to other people’s content that their readers are hot to read.

A great blogger is truly “plugged in” to their niche market. They all have a system of getting a heads up on anything and everything that is happening in that niche. When you have built a pipeline of a constant flow of information, you won’t have any problem finding content to blog about. Done well you’ll have people who jump out of bed and read your blog before they brush their teeth. (sometimes I’m not even fully dressed and I’m reading Darren or Jensense).

How do they do it? . . . A news aggregator!

• There is a mess of them out there, but the one that is most comfortable for me is Bloglines, so I’ll use it as an example. Set up a Bloglines account, then scroll down to the bottom of the navigation window and select “Create Email Subscriptions”. Bloglines will assign you an email address that kinda looks like garyfugere.13999089@bloglines.com. Why set up a Bloglines email account? Here it is in Bloglines own words:

Bloglines free email accounts allow people to receive email newsletter subscriptions within their MyBloglines page. This helps to reduce traffic through your primary email inbox and helps to contain the spam menace. A Bloglines email account gives you a trump card when a newsletter breaks the rules of opt-in marketing. When you unsubscribe from a Bloglines email subscription, the email address disappears. You never have to worry about trying to find the unsubscribe instructions for an unwanted mailing list.

Finding the nuggets of compelling content.

• Subscribe to lots of blogs
  • In the top right corner of all Bloglines pages is a search box that has a default setting of “Search all blogs”.
  • Enter your primary keyword. When Bloglines has returned the results of its search scroll through the list and preview those that look like they might be relevant (Don’t start reading posts, yet or you won’t come up for air for 48 hours). Subscribe to those that will be great sources for news and stimulating ideas in your niche.
  • Repeat the above for each keyword on your Wordtracker research list.
  • MSN will find even more RSS Feeds for you than Bloglines. In the search box type in Feed:your keyword I was very surprised at how many feeds I found on MSN that Bloglines missed.
• Monitor the keywords
  • While you were subscribing to those blogs, did you notice the button just to the right of the keyword entry box titled: “Subscribe to this search”? I didn’t either until someone pointed it out to me.
  • This is one of the most powerful search tools I have ever encountered. This little beauty will search through every blog post in the blogosphere every day and display those posts that contain the keywords you have entered.
    • For example, in Barb’s case we subscribed to the keyword search on the phrase “hairstyle tip” now if an electrical engineering blog creates a post with the words “hairstyle tip” Barb is going to know about it the next morning. I put in two keyword phrases myself (ping service and blog submission) just this week that will give me heads up on new places to promote our blogs.
      • Ya, you got to kiss a lot of frogs, to find a Prince, but you’ll become real good at scanning in short order.
  • “But what about the rest of the Internet” you ask? Well, Google Alerts can help us out with that one. Go to http://www.google.com/alerts?hl=en and type in your keywords one at a time. Select “News and Web” from the drop down list. But use your Bloglines email address instead of your personal email.
    • Now guess what, if the keyword phrase “hairstyle tip” appears anywhere in cyberspace . . . Barb is going to read about it the next morning.
• Subscribe to everything
  • Now start prowling your competitors, news groups, ezines, newsletters, trade associations, suppliers . . . etc Subscribe to anything and everything related to your niche, and have it all delivered into your Bloglines email account without any concern whatsoever about spam.
  • Yahoo Buzz will feed you all sources of information about cultural tends and hot search terms.
  • Do a Bloglines search on the keyword “trend” and subscribe to any feeds that deals with where your niche zealots’ heads are.
• Pay a weekly visit to http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html, I’ll let Google’s own words tell you why:

For both breaking news and obscure information alike, people around the world search Google. This flurry of searches often exposes interesting trends, patterns, and surprises.

The Google Zeitgeist page is regularly updated to reflect tidbits of information related to the search behavior of Google users.

• You’ll want to stay on top of all of the hot trends in the Blogosphere. Source that you should track weekly is Blog Pulse.
• Don’t forget the old media, you are still going to want those snail mail, print versions of magazines and periodicals delivered every month. You should have a bookcase full of the books that pertain to your niche. Then anytime you face writers block just grab a book off the shelf and thumb through it, you’ll have lots of ideas.

If you can’t find content using these sources, you are either too fussy or in the wrong niche. If the latter is the case, dump it and move onto a more productive niche they are everywhere. But if you are too fussy . . . don’t quit your day job.

Here are more sources for finding information on the Internet

Amazon’s Search Inside Books

Topix News Feeds

Get Cited Author and Publication Search

Quotation and Authority Locator

Electronic Library

Refdesk.com

XanEdu ReSearch Engine

Find Articles

MagPortal

Yahoo’s Creative Commons Search

Adobe PDF Search Engine

How Stuff Works

Libraries and Research Links

Wikipedia Project the Online Encyclopedia

The Library of Congress

Google Groups

Yahoo Groups

Cyberfinder Index

Private Investigator Tools

2/4/06 Updates:

• Since I originally wrote this artice, I have been outdone by Lorelle on WordPress she has produced the ultimate list for finding new contact it is a must read for anyone who wants to stay abreast of a niche market.
• Podcasting and audio files are becoming ubiquitous on the Internet and up till now I was frustrated in trying to find or idnetify audio infromation about my niche marketing. But no longer, you gotta check out Podzinger.com the first search engine that will find keywords in any audio content on the Interenet. Try it . . . it blows your socks off.

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