Every successful blogger I know have one thing in common, they believe that unique content is king. That phrase has been so overused, that it now almost becomes a cliché. It’s not that I don’t agree with that, it’s just that I don’t think that’s enough. Unique content doesn’t guarantee the top spots in Google. It also doesn’t guarantee that there will be a lot of people linking back to your post or tweet about your post. So, what is the point of having unique content if there’s nobody reading it? Except you’re one of those big blogs, you need to actively make an effort to drive new traffic to your sites and making them your subscribers. The first step in driving traffic to a blog is market research, which include keywords, demographic, and news research. These are the top 6 websites to do your blogs research in.
1. Yahoo! Buzz
Launched in February 2008, Yahoo! Buzz is very similar to Digg. It takes stories from pre-approved news publishers (100 at the time of its launch) and lets users vote on stories and push them up to the top of the page. Like Digg, the more users that vote for a story, via the embedded button or on the Buzz site, the higher the story goes on Buzz. But user voting isn’t the only factor in how well stories do. Yahoo is also looking at their search engine logs in real time to determine hot or breaking news. Stories on that topic will get an extra boost in the rankings.
How could you use it? Use Yahoo!Buzz to check for possible topics you want to blog about, whether they are on the rise or are moving downwards. Maybe, it’s already dead, meaning nobody is talking about it anymore. If that happen, maybe you want to consider changing your blogs or articles’ topic.
2. Blog Pulse
Blog Pulse is a search engine for blogs, similar to Technorati. It aggregates and ranks blog posts based on the activities surrounding particular topics. The rise in popularity of a topic is triggered by how many people blog about it or how many times have the original post been quoted or linked back by other sites. But, that is not even half of what Blog Pulse offers, as they make the deal even sweeter with their cool market research tools. You could get a quick view of the buzz surrounding a topic by visiting Blog Pulse Featured Trends category. Or use its Conversation Tracker tool to tracks how many links and quotes have been made regarding a particular topic. And finally, you could use its powerful Trend Search tool to see the popularity of a topic over a period of 1 month, 2months, and 6 months.
How could you use it? Find inspiration from the abundance of topics offered with this tool. Also, all of the featured articles have been proven popular in the blogosphere. So you might want to blog about similar topics to get into the buzz. What more? You could sort the trends by niches, like Politics, Health & Fitness, etc.
3. Google Insights For Search
Google Insights for Search provides data on search performed with Google search engine over a period of time. It doesn’t provide the actual search numbers, like Google Keyword Tool, but it gave you an overall look of a particular keyword trends. Before you do a search, you could choose whether to filter your results by categories, time frame, or countries. The search performed with Google Insights would give you an overall look of a niche or keyword you are targeting. It also lists the countries that performed the searches, the keywords related to your keywords that are rising in search numbers, and a whole lot more.
How could you use it? You could use this tool to find the most popular keywords at the moment and its possible future popularity (Google try to predict it through its graph). You could use this info, together with all the related searches, to find your article’s topic. You could even based your writing style on the data they provided. Like, if most of the searches (for that keyword) are performed by non-English speaking countries, you might want to reduce the amount of slang in your article.
4. Google Keyword Tool
This is the best free keyword tool. As the largest search engine in the world, the search data provided by Google is usually pretty accurate. It is very good to find good long-term keywords to target, but not so much for keywords that are more short-term. Short-term keywords are something like Nokia N71 or Samsung NX-876VG camera. It’s better to use Google Insights just to check if the popularity is rising, since the number provided by Google Keyowrd Tool won’t be accurate. But, for more long term keywords, like dog training, it’s pretty accurate and very useful.
How could you use it? Go too Google Keyword Tool site. Put your keywords in to check how many searches are performed last month and the average searches performed every single month (for the last 12 months).
5. Wonder Wheel
Google (the company) have recently updated the search engine of their two most popular sites, Google and Youtube, with this fantastic tool called Wonder Wheel. After you performed your search in Google, you could click the small button below the search box called “Show Options”. In there, you would find the Wonder Wheel. Wonder Wheel allows you to find more specific keywords out of your more general keywords. You could go deeper into any keywords until Google stops giving you new ones. You could do the same thing in Youtube by clicking on the Wonder Wheel button that appeared on the top right corner of the screen every time you do a search on Youtube.
How could you use it? You could find topics to blog about with the Google wonder wheel. Or find what keyword you should be using for your next Youtube, with Youtube’s Wonder Wheel. Since you might want to target more specific keywords for less competition, but more views.
6. AllTop
It’s like reading magazines without having to pay for them. That’s the concept for All Top, created by Guy Kawasaki. AllTop, similar to the Feedly (Firefox Add-on), gather RSS data from a bunch of websites and blogs, and present them in one easily digestible manner. Unlike Feedly, however, AllTop only listed the headlines of latest posts from your favorite blogs. This makes it easier for you to browse a whole range of blogs at once, and simply click on the headlines that interest you most to read more. AllTop also have more blogs aggregated to it by default, compared to Feedly or any other RSS readers.
How could you use it? You could first arrange your AllTop’s user interface, particularly on what blogs would appear inside your account. Then, from the tidbits of information gathered in your AllTop account, you could start writing your articles.
These are the 6 websites that you could use to do blogs research, whether keyword research, or a more general topic research. Feel free to leave comments or tweet it if you like it.
Related Posts:
{ 2 trackbacks }
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I have been using the wonder wheel for a little while now. I really like this one for helping in determining similar words to add to my targeted keywords. Great post Andi!
I’ve never use any of this tools…
It is new for me.. I really appreciate this knowledge..
I don’t know about Google Insights. Thanks for sharing.
Hei! Why don’t you add the links to each of those sites? It will be useful for many people.