Finding hot topics with StumbleUpon and Digg

Sunday, August 16th, 2009 at 1:46 pm

This past week Nicole Dean has been guest blogging on one of my other blogs and her topic for the week was How To Get Ideas For Your Next Blog Post.

I will be going into more detail on occasion here. Today we will look at this tip.

19. StumbleUpon and Digg.

If youâ€™re not using StumbleUpon and Digg yet, youâ€™re totally missing out on my favorite tool for watching whatâ€™s hot (and youâ€™re missing out on boatloads of traffic). I love my StumbleUpon.com traffic, but I also use the site to research interesting ideas for blog posts and Twitter tweets. Check out the site.

StumbleUpon and Dig can be an excellent idea platform and let you know what is really hot in your niche. First go to StumbleUpon and login.

You will see a search box in the upper right. Add in your topic and click search. Because I like blogging I will use that as a keyword.

I used a very general term and the first thing you will notice is the ability to apply a filter with options listed of related filters. Because I write about WordPress here I will use that as my filter..

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Then I can either browse those results and I did the top topics was plugins so I can drill down a bit more by clicking the plugin filter.

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Next I can sort the list by either ratings or reviews.

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Looking at these lists I can see that the strongest ratings and the most reviews are consistently plugin lists. So if I am looking for a topic I would now look to do a post on one of the following.

Top 10 Must Have Plugins
8 Plugins Every Review Blog Must Have
5 Plugins To Reward Your Commenters.

Now it only took me about 3 minutes total going through StumbleUpon to find these topics and come up with potential blog posts with my slant that I know have a good chance of being popular.

You can sort through Digg in the same manner but StunbleUpon is my personal favorite for ideas.

Once you know the keywords you are looking for finding ideas that have a good chance of being popular is easy. If you do not know how to create your keyword tree and find profitable keywords check out the Keyword Call this Wednesday with Steve Roye and myself.

Mike Paetzold