In my last post, I went over one of the many ways you could
use Google’s calendar to help schedule your blog posts, email messages or
online articles.
In this post, I’ll show
you how to use various websites to find topics that you can easily write. Moreover,
I’m going to show you how you can also check to see whether or not these
sources are worthy of even writing in the first place.
Note: I am absolutely NOT advocating copying other people’s
work. You can always write about the subjects
and ideas in your own way and with your own words. But, you should never
violate copyright laws under any circumstances.
I’m sure you won’t go to jail over this, but you’ll probably get sued.
Not only that, it is dishonest. So, do not copy and paste for any reason!
Using the Calendar to
Schedule Your Articles or Posts
Once you get a calendar that you want to use (standard,
online, piece of paper, planner, whatever) you can now start to log in about 3
months of topics that you can write about.
You will be going to various sites to look up topics and then you will
be looking at specifics within those topics.
This is the same way Oprah, Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, The View and a
host of other talk shows come up with their subjects and content. Ever notice how 99% of the people on those
shows have written books??? They use
this content method themselves to get loads of ideas.
Let’s get started with…Amazon.
Using Amazon to
Generate Ideas for Your Articles and Blog Posts
Rather than waste a lot of your time writing up a huge
description of how this is supposed to work, I’m going to take you by the hand,
step-by-step and teach you exactly what you need to know. The reason I do things in this manner is so that
I won’t leave holes in my procedure.
I
want you to have the full, unadulterated method to do this, so that it is “turn-key”. In other words, you could pass these
instructions on to other people and they should be able to do it with very
little help.
Scenario: You want to
write about and share information on how to use social media on your blog. However, you have no idea what to write about
or what people are interested in.
Drilling Down to Find Your Topics
Here’s how you do it. (By the way, you can use the same
method of research for creating information products, or finding a niche for
your business.)
Click on “Books” in Amazon’s search field drop-down menu.
This will mean that you are only searching in
the Amazon book category. This is the
ideal place to find topics related to what we want to write about.
Make sure you click “GO” on the search field.
Step
2: Next, you will need to scroll down
the page until you see “Books” on the left hand side of the screen. These are the categories of books there
are.
Now we can start drilling down and
get very specific about what we want to write about.
In our case, we'll want to look in either the “Business and Investing” category, or the “Computers
and Technology” category.
Click on the “Computers and Technology” category.
Step 3: Keep doing the drilling down process until we get to the social media books. Here is the drill:
Computers & Technology ---> Internet & Web Culture ---> Social Media for Businesses
You should now see books listed in the middle of the page
(Yes, I could have told you to simply go into Amazon's search engine, and type in "social media" and you would have found these. However, we are trying to generate ideas here! By drilling down, you'll have access to all sorts of ideas and topics you may not have otherwise thought about!)
Using the Sort Menu to Find Reviews
Step 4: I want you to move over to the right side of Amazon's page at this point. You will see a drop down menu called "Sort By". Open the menu and select "Most Reviews".
The reason we're using the sort menu to find the most reviews is because we are looking for the most popular books on this subject.
If there are a lot of comments, that's good thing because it means quite a few people actually read the book. Also, they cared enough about it to comment, rate, and post it into Amazon.
Negative Reviews Are Important Too!
The other reason why highly commented on books are important is because you can look at the negative reviews and see what people WISH were in those books.
I recently did research on a piece of software a company was hiring me to write about. I checked out the software they were selling on Amazon and in the process I looked at all of the negative comments people posted on Amazon. By the time I was finished doing my research, I actually had enough ammunition to write an information product telling users how to overcome these problems.
So, negative reviews are also important.
On the right hand side of the books listed, you'll see a row of stars. Some of them a colored in and others are not. There is also a number next to the stars that indicates the number of comments made.
Step 5: Click on the title of the book. Next, you can actually click on the cover of the book to see the table of contents.
These are the subjects that people will be interested in. If you were creating a niche, you could get real specific about it and write about a very specific top or angle of this subject.
Inside of Mr. Kerpen's excellent book, is a table of contents. As a matter of fact, Amazon almost always has a "Look Inside" feature which shows you the Table of Contents of the book.
One of the chapters is called "Think and Act Like Your Customer". You could almost make an entire niche out of a title like that.
Step 6: Write down the idea on your calendar. You should try to post a new blog post just about every 3 days or so. Monday, Wednesday and Friday would be a good idea for spacing of your posts.
Step 7: Scroll down the page and check out the reviews. If you see anything negative or something people felt that was left out of a book like this, then you may have fertile ground for a hot topic. So, look for opportunities in these types of comments.
Step 8: Rinse and repeat. Do the same procedure for as many books in your topic area as you can. Just looking at the Table of Contents sections will give you a load of ideas, and you can take that title or idea, Google it and find a boat load of articles all over the Internet on that particular subject.
BONUS: Another Way to Find Hot Topics in Your Niche To Write About
I recently watched an excellent video on how to use social media by a guy named Michael Hyatt. Apparently Mr. Hyatt is pretty big in the Internet Marketing arena, but I had not actually heard of him until today.
Anyway, on this video he highlights 10 different ways you can use social media to boost your business or popularity on the Web. You could use each one of these ideas to expand on in a series of blog posts very easily.
Here is the video:
On My Next Post:
I'm going to show you how to gain a huge following pretty quickly by using social media sites and a host of other ideas, so that people will actually come to your site and read your posts, opt-in to your email posts and eventually hand you wads of cash!
Until next time, God Bless!
Mark "Elmo" Ellis
"When it comes to high response copy, I've got your back!"
