Online, you will find millions of blogs, news websites and thousands of online wire services publishing press releases and news articles daily. How is it possible for you and your business to find anything that is interesting with all the information noise? How do you find information that is relevant to your business that you can use and that you can share with your target audience?
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Reading and staying up to date with the latest trends is a key component of digital marketing. How are you going to stay up to date with all the latest news and updates that is happening at the moment that might impact your job or business?
If you think that this is a huge problem, it is not with the help of Google blog search, Google Alerts, Twitter real time search, RSS (real simple syndication), and Apps. Using these channels you can find valuable and interesting information regarding people, companies, real-time news, what is happening right now somewhere in the world and what is the current trend at the moment.
These methods can also help you research what others are saying about you, your business, and your competition online. Find below some information that you can use.
How to find relevant content online
Blog search
One of the easiest ways to find interesting blog posts is to do a simple search on Google Blog Search, Reddit, Stumbleupon or other relevant blog aggregator channels. There’s literally hundreds of them. With most of these channels, you can bookmark any interesting posts that you can read/research at a later stage.
Google Alerts
You can use Google Alerts to set up “alerts” so that you receive an email when new information regarding any topic is published online. You can set up alerts for brand mentions, blog posts or any topic so that you are notified when something new is published. These alerts can be setup so that you are immediately notified when there’s an update or you can select to have a daily summary sent to you.
Google Alerts is also excellent in tracking your own name or brand where you can be notified as soon as you are mentioned in a content piece that Google has indexed.
RSS aggregation
Another way to stay informed of new content is with RSS aggregation. The social media sphere lives and breathes RSS. RSS can be used in couple of different ways. Almost
every blog has a form of RSS integration which can either be accessed through a directly link or from doing a simple search on RSS reader channels such as Feedly.com. Once you have accessed the RSS feed of a blog, you can choose if you want to subscribe to that feed using a RSS reader so that you are notified when new blog posts are published.
There are many standalone RSS feed readers available that you can use and I’m using Feedly on the web, my smartphone and tablet.
Twitter real-time search
This is the power of Twitter. Do you want to know what is happening right now this minute about a specific topic or niche? Do a search on Twitter’s search engine to find all the information as it happens in real-time. You can use the advanced search properties to find out exactly what you are looking for and also filter the results by location.
Apps
There are many smartphone and tablet apps available that syndicates content from a variety of sources. Some of the apps that I use on a daily basis include Zite and Flipboard. Most of the time if you are interested in a specific topic you only need to search for the topic and it will automatically give you all the relevant content items it has found on the topic. You can save your search to view new items at a later stage. These apps also includes sharing functionality where you can share the content directly from the app to selected social media channels.
These are just some methods you can use to find information online. There are many other ways that might be easier, but these will get you started with finding the right content. The web is crowded with information and it’s noisy. Use these methods to find a needle of information in a haystack of content.
