Today I want to talk about another method that I use to locate ideas for my niche websites/blogs that I have.

(You can find the first post about this @ How do I find ideas for my niche blogs?)

Both of the methods I am going to talk about today use Twitter.

The first one uses Twitter directly. So, to start off you just need to go to http://twitter.com and log in. Once you are logged in and you are on your home page you should see a search box in the right hand side of your page.

 

Type your keyword into this box and either hit the ‘enter’ key or you can click on the little magnifying glass next to the search box. Once you do this you will see that the RSS feed link near the bottom of the right sidebar will now say ‘RSS feed for this query’. You can now click on this to add this particular search to your RSS reader. Now when anyone tweets about anything that has this particular keyword you will see it in your reader.

The next resource that I use is TweetLater. TweetLater is a free service that you can use to monitor multiple Twitter accounts, autofollow those that follow you, and send out tweets at a predetermined time. They do have an professional upgrade option that gives you more functionality, but it is not neccessary for what I am going to show you today.

First off you will need to setup a free account at TweetLater if you don’t already have one. Once you are signed up and logged in you will want to look for your toolbar and find the option that says ‘Other Tools’.

After you click on ‘Other Tools’ you will want to look for an option that says ‘Keyword Alert Emails’ and click on it.

You will now see the screen below. All you need to do is follow the directions on this page and add as many keywords as you want to get alerts on. Keywords are sparated by one on each line. As in Google if you want a phrase match you will want to put multiple word keywords in quotes.

Just be aware that all of these keywords will come in one email and it can get very, very long if you have a lot of popular keywords. You can select how often you want to receive the emails: Once a day, every 12 hours, or every 4 hours. This is entirely up to you and will probably be based on how many keywords you are watching.

As you can see from the image above there is also a ‘Power Keyword Wizard’ that will let you narrow down your search even more if you are finding too much information. There are several options in this and I am not going to cover those here. You can check it out if you like, but it is not necessary for this to work.

Again, just to make this clear. This is only what I use to get ideas for posts on my niche blogs. I am not trying to tell you to copy any information that you find as that would lead to copyright infringements. I just use this to keep up to date with what is going on in some of my niches so that I can keep my readers up to date.

Thanks for reading and have a great day!