Using Twitter Search and Trending Topics

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Twitter is a large social networking site where users share “what’s happening”. Find out the most popular topics being discussed on Twitter. You can also search for discussions on specific topics. Go to http://search.twitter.com and use the search box to find discussions on certain topics and see the most popular topics: Click through any of … Read More

Using Google News

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Google News shows the top new stories from around the world. You can browse and search for certain locations, publications and more. It’s a good resource for finding current events and issues around which you can shape content. You can sign up for alerts via email, RSS and even on your mobile phone. Go to … Read More

Using Google Suggest

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While it is now integrated into regular Google search, “Google Suggest” is a tool that suggest popular keyword phrases based on what you are entering into a search engine. Just go to http://google.com and start entering keywords. In our example, we enter “Amazon Kindle” and see what comes up: You can keep entering words and … Read More

Using Google Insights for Search

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Google Insights for Search allows you to compare search volume patterns across regions, categories, time and more. Go to http://www.google.com/insights/search/ to get started. The following screen shows how you can narrow down your data: Here’s an example of a Location Search. We’ve chosen the UK and England as our location. We’ve chosen “Web Search” (as … Read More

Using Google Trends

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Google Trends allows you to see some of the most popular keyword searches and see their popularity over time. It also allows you to compare the popularity of keywords as well. You can get started at http://google.com/trends. On the main page, you’ll “hot topics”: And then more specifically, you can see the “Hot Searches”: At … Read More

Google Alerts

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Google Alerts are a handy way to receive updates on newly indexed content on topics / keywords of your choosing. Updates are sent via email, at a frequency you choose. Go to http://google.com/alerts to get started. For example, if you have a site about dog booties, you might set up alerts for things like “dog … Read More

Using Google Blog Search

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Google Blog Search uses Google’s search technology to index and display content from blogs around in the world, in a variety of languages. It’s useful for finding popular stories in given categories and an on certain topics. You can also find out what the popular blog searches are. Go to http://blogsearch.google.com to get started. You … Read More

Using Magazines.com

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Magazines.com is a huge website where you can browse and purchase a variety of magazine, journal, book and newspaper subscriptions. This site can be a handy tool for researching niche markets with the theory being if there are magazines or other publications in a particular topic and advertisers paying to be in those publications, there … Read More

Using EzineArticles

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Ezine Articles is a human-edited database of articles of nearly 300,000 thousand authors. It’s useful for finding ideas for your own content and seeing which keyword phrases writers are targeting. Many authors try to use Ezine Articles authority to gain top rankings for keyword phrases and those keyword phrases often appear in the titles of … Read More

Using eHow

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eHow.com is a large website with “how to” articles on a wide variety of topics and is a good source of content ideas. They are known to have good search engine rankings and provide clues to some of the more popular topics you might create content about. You can browse through topics by category. The … Read More