There are two tools that I think people need to use more often when writing posts. They make life easier by helping you find topics to write about, and other blogs that have also written about the topic. So what are they? Simple: Google Alerts, and Google Custom Search.
Google Alerts, lets you setup keywords to track. For example, I might track “Left The Box” to see if anyone references this site. When Google indexes, or finds something with the term “Left The Box”, they send me an email to let me know. Google Alerts helps me monitor my online presence.
This is the most basic of ways to use it. To take it further we’ll play around with the basic options we get. When you create an alert you get the choice to be alerted at the moment something is found or daily; which opens up a host of possibilities.
If you’d like a recap of what people have said about “Social Media” for the day, just create a daily Social Media Alert. This way I can think of new topics for posts, see what others are saying, and stay one step ahead of other bloggers. I might never have found a majority of the blogs in my RSS Feed without these alerts.
The next step is to take the fundamental idea and extrapolate it more. When I write a post, for example “Social Media Transparency” which spoke about about honesty in online PR, I create an alert based around the idea of the post. This way I can see what others are saying about it, and maybe send them an email with my post to tell them to see what I’ve written. Sometimes they’ll link back, but if they don’t at least I’ve made a contact. In the future they might read my blog, and maybe link to another post.
The second tool, Google Custom Search, is great for bloggers because it allows you to search niche engines. My friend Dave from Huomah.com created an awesome engine for Search Engine Optimizers, called Search SEO Pros. If I’m researching a post, I’ll use the niche search engine to search niche specific sites. It makes it easy to remove the spam, and find only what I need.
The custom search engines are also great for finding posts to link out to. Just search the topic you’re writing about in your post and you’ll find a number of other posts you can reference.
These are just two of the many tools I use when writing a blog post. I’ll write about more in the future, so look out for that.
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