I get asked often…”How do I find topics to write about on my blog?” The answer is pretty simple…I use my feed reader.

What I’ve done is identified a number of topics that I want my blog to focus on. I then search for those topics in Google Blog Search. Once the search results come up, I subscribe to the RSS feed for that specific search. Now each time I update my feeds, I get an update of the most recent and relevant results of from a search for that topic.

This may not seem like such a big deal. But think of it this way…if I want to seach for 10 topics each day to write about, I would need to go to Google Blog Search, search for each topic, read through the results, click on interesting links to read about the post and then somehow capture the link for that post for future use. And, I’d have to do that 9 more times to search 10 topics.
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A few weeks back I got into ‘the 2000 Bloggers.’ It sounded like a really neat idea to build some links and gain some traffic to my blog. And it worked, at least to some degree. Looking at my site stats in Google Analytics, it appears I have gained some traffic from the 2000 Bloggers.

But the place that it made the most impact was on my Technorati ranking. Every day I watched my ranking in Technorati change; and change a lot. Some days I’d jump 30,000 positions. It was amazing. And for a few weeks, I was quite excited. As of today, my ranking is somewhere around 26,000 – a long way from where I began four short weeks ago at 1,618,000.

At first, I didn’t put together that my jump in rankings had anything to do with the 2000 Bloggers. Every day I was writing posts and commenting on a number of other blogs. I figured my ranking was due to my efforts. Until one day early last week I looked more closely at who was linking to me. To my surprise, the great majority, more than 75%, were from the 2000 Bloggers.
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I like Google. And I want every single page of content on my site in Google’s search database. Likely, you do too.

Now we could each wait for Google’s bots to crawl our sites and find our content – both old and new. Or, we could force the issue a little bit by taking advantage of a Google’s Webmaster Tools.

Part of Google’s Webmaster Tools is Google Sitemap. With Google Sitemap, you can submit a site map of your website/blog to Google and their bots will pick up your new content right away. Much faster than waiting for the bots to come back around your server.

My new friend Gary Conn covers the ‘how to’ using WordPress and a WordPress plugin in a great post from a couple of days back. Read his post for the details. But here are the highlights:

Step One: Add Your URL to Google.
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Michael Miller over at informit.com has written a nice article exploring some of Google’s lesser known features. Here’s a list from the site. The article goes into an explanation of each feature. Definitely work a looksee.

1. Google Is a Calculator
2. Google Knows Mathematical Constants
3. Google Converts Units of Measure
4. Google Is a Dictionary
5. Google Is a Glossary
6. Google Lists All the Facts
7. Google Displays Weather Reports
8. Google Knows Current Airport Conditions
9. Google Tracks Flight Status
10. Google Tracks Packages
11. Google Is a Giant Phone Directory
12. Google Knows Area Codes
13. Google Has Movie Information
14. Google Loves Music
15. Google Knows the Answer to the Ultimate Question

go to the Additional Resources

Everyone seems to be asking me about blogs. What is it? Do I need one? Where do I get one?

So I thought I’d answer some of these questions in this month’s newsletter. And specifically I want to answer the question…”Should I Blog?”

What is a ‘Blog’?
Simply, a blog is an online journal stored on a website. Just like with your bound journal, you make post entries into your blog. These entries are then recorded and posted to your blogging website. However, unlike a paper journal, what you write is available for the entire world to read.

Why would I want someone to read my journal?
Simple, because you have something to share. Blogs aren’t, necessarily, about your deep, inner personal thoughts (though they can be). They are about anything that interests you. That’s one of the beauties of blogging – you write about what you know or have interest in. So your blog can be about anything – a business niche, an area of expertise, even a hobby. The sky’s the limit. You’ll even find blogs that are simply links to the updates in other blogs.

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