Subscribing to an endless stream of information for new blog posts

Coming up with ideas for things to write about can be very nerve-racking. Today I am going to show you how to use Google News, Yahoo News and Technorati to get an endless supply of information to write about. Google News, Yahoo news and technorati are great resources to find new things to write about and gather research to support your ideas. In addition to these three sites, what I am going to show you can be applied to other news and information feeds. It will just take a little research and playing in order to get them to supply you with the information you want.

So lets get into how we are going to go about extracting the information from these sources. For this example I am going to use voice-over-ip or VOIP as our niche topic. First lets come up with 5 terms or phrases that we what to use to gather news and information for. We’ll use VOIP, voice-over-ip, Internet Telephony, Digital Phone Service and Internet Phone Calls. You can come up with as many search phrases as you want. Now that we have our keyword phrases lets go through the process of getting our news and automating it so that it delivers the information to us daily.

Google News – With Google News we have 2 options for how we want to receive new news items, through email or via RSS Feed. I’ll show you both.

• Fist navigate to news.google.com
• Enter your first Search term, and click search.
• This will return news items pertaining to your searched term or phrase.
• Now we’re going to set things up so that we get new items as they happen through email or the FEED.
• Toward the bottom of the side bar you will see “News Alerts”. Click on that.
• The next screen will allow you to choose how you want the alerts. How often is important. If you only want one email a day or several depending on the number of items that occur.
• Make sure you enter your email address and click “Create alert”.
• If you would rather just get the RSS Feed you can subscribe to it just below the News Alerts link.

Yahoo News – Yahoo news setup is very similar to the Google setup we just went through.

• Head to the Yahoo news site at http://news.search.yahoo.com
• Enter your search term and click search
• On the right hand side toward the bottom look for “GET Updates”
• This will give you your options for email and RSS Feed Subscriptions
  The difference is that Yahoo requires you to have a Yahoo account. So if you don’t have a Yahoo account you will need to register to receive emails from them.

Technorati – Technorati is the search engine of Blogs. They are indexing over 110 million blogs currently and there are topics on everything. Technorati is a great place to see what the buzz is within any Niche. Currently there are no options to have stories emailed to you (at least not that I know of) but you can subscribe to Feeds. There are only a couple steps to create the feed you want, so here goes.

• Point your browser to http://www.technorati.com
• search your keyword
• At the top of the search results there will be a link to subscribe to that feed.

So there you have it. Endless streams of information for great ideas to write your articles.

Written by jblanton from Success For Your Blog
Posted on November 15th, 2007 and filed under Writing
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