Staying on the cutting edge

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 at 10:28 am

Staying ahead of the story line in your niche can be very beneficial for your traffic. As an example I picked up on the story of Six Apart supporting some WordPress plugins for their proprietary items. It was a big story because Six Apart is the owner of the Typepad blogging platform and is a competitor of WordPress.

The key though is that by being among the first I have gotten some good backlinks and traffic from others referring to my story.

Here is a simple way to keep abreast with whatever is hot in your niche. Google news is constantly updating by keyword. They also have an rss feed for any keyword search you make.

This allows me to monitor any topic for the latest stories easily. Take your topic and go to Google News and do a search.

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Click on the RSS icon and go get the url for the feed. The next step is to add the feed to your reader of choice (in my case I stick with Google and use Google reader but any feed reader will work).

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Click the add a subscription button and fill in the feed url. You will get a box that looks like this.

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Click add and then each time you open the reader you will see all the new items that Google has found on your topic. You can follow the same format to add any leading bloggers in your niche, other topics you want to follow or any other feed that you find helpful.

For me I check the reader a couple times a day and get the latest items all in one place allowing me to stay current, know which blogs I might want to go comment on or any other item that will allow me to be a cutting edge resource.

After all anything that saves me time and allows me to keep up to date with a minimal time investment is something I want to do. What about you?

Mike Paetzold