Yesterday in 31-Days to Kick Your Blog in the Butt, we discussed briefly F.L.E.E. I am hoping you have had a chance to consider how you might use this technique in your own blogging.
As we continue onwards and upwards with our understanding and use of F.L.E.E., today we are going to spend some time focusing on just Find. Finding the conversations in our niche, target market, business or professional area of interest.
Remember we don’t want to be a stick in the mud. We want to be proactive bloggers who go out there and get involved in what is happening in the blog world. Especially as it relates to what we are blogging about.
Today Lesson
First of all, why should we care about finding the conversations taking place in the big bad blog world which might be in our niche or target market? The answer is simple, and really contains a minimum of three parts:
- As a business, don’t we have a responsibility to keep informed about what is happening in our own niche or market. Aren’t we better at what we do if we know what is happening in our market.
- As a business don’t we want to know what our “competitors” are doing. Don’t we want to know what new things they are trying. Even the things that are and are not working for them.
- As a business, don’t we want to know what our prospective clients and/or customers are reading online. And if we know what they are looking at online, we can see how we can give them better information so they come to rely on us for that information.
However, before we can do the three items mentioned above, we have to Find those conversations in our niche and/or market. One of the first tools you should be using to find blogs in your niche is Google Blog Search. It works just like any Google search. Type in a topic or some keywords you want to follow and Google Blog Search will pull up search results with blogs as the results.
Here are some search results I received when I used the search term “using social media promote your business”. Each result is a blog discussing this particular topic and a topic I blog about.
What I would do with these results will be discussed in the next couple of blog post when we continue to discover the other elements of F.L.E.E. But don’t stop with using only Google Blog Search. You should also be on twitter and you have a great search tool available to you for twitter too. Twitter Search can be used just like a Google search to find conversations taking place on twitter.
Here are the same search results taking place on twitter for “using social media promote your business”.
I hope you are seeing the power of just these two search tools you can use to find the conversations taking place in your particular niche or market. What is so powerful about using these tools to find conversations is that you will be well ahead of your competitors. You will put yourself in a position to know what is being discussed in your niche and/or market. And you will know what people are looking for online. How Find fits into the big picture of blogging will become more apparent as we discuss the other elements of F.L.E.E. over the next few days.
Additional sources of bloggers in your niche
Today’s Homework
You guessed it. I want you to use Google Blog Search and Twitter Search to find conversations taking place in your niche or particular market. Try different search terms to see what results you get. And try narrowing down your search too.
Tomorrow we are going to discuss the second part of F.L.E.E. when we talk about Listen. Listening to those conversations taking place in our niche or market.
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