One of the toughest parts of blogging is coming up with a great topics. It’s hard enough thinking of a great headline, writing great content, finding relevant images, and promoting the content. This blog post will at least help you simplify the topic generation part.
Did you know that Google Reader is a great spot to help you come up with topic ideas? You can organize relevant blogs together and also add the RSS feeds for various Q&A sites such as Quora or LinkedIn.
Let’s go through some of the steps to get your Google Reader set up so you’ll have a head start on topic generation.
Configure Google Reader
If you haven’t already, go out and get Google Reader.
After you log into Google Reader, the first thing to do is to switch from ‘Expanded View’ to ‘List View’. This makes it easier to scan more topics:
After you do that, find some of the popular blogs you like reading in your niche. In the example below, I created a folder for SEO blogs that I like to read. I like to include the blogs by their Twitter handles for easy reference. (Note: If you’re looking for some SEO blogs to add to your reader, you can use this resource).
By doing this, I can see what people are talking about in the niche. If there’s a trending topic, I might choose to write about that. If I disagree with someone on a subject, I might write a blog post on my differing point of view.
That’s not all though.
Subscribe to Q&A RSS Feeds
Let’s say you are a plumber you need topic ideas. The typical reaction to a niche like this is that ‘there’s nothing to talk about in this boring niche’.
Wrong.
Q&A sites such as Quora or LinkedIn are great starting points to see what kinds of questions people are asking about.
Let’s see what people are talking about in regards to plumbing:
Perfect, now competing plumbers won’t know what hit them when you create the greatest plumbing content in the world. Both your prospects and search engines will love you.
But you don’t want to have to keep going back to these sites manually to look for these questions because that takes a lot of time.
Google Reader will help you solve this problem – all you have to do is subscribe to the individual RSS feed of each section and you’re good to go.
Check out this video to find out where the RSS subscribe buttons are for Quora, LinkedIn, and Yahoo Answers.
You can even subscribe to specific Twitter’s on searches as well – here’s how you can do it.
Use IFTTT and BufferApp for easy curation
IFTTT serves as a sort of personal assistant that allows you to specify tasks that you would like certain apps to complete. Their motto is to ‘put the internet to work for you’.
BufferApp allows you to space out your tweets to save time.
When you combine these two tools with Google Reader, it allows for easy curation. All you have to do is star posts that you like to be scheduled for tweeting later.
Here’s the specific task if you’d like to add it to your IFTTT account.
Viola! Tweeting made easier.
Conclusion
The methods above ultimately help you save more time so you can focus your energy on completing more important tasks.
They’re simple to execute and you’ll find them very useful to your daily activities once you implement them.
What are some other tricks or tools you use to save time?
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