We all know the content is king, and to have a successful blog you need to give your readers consistent, accurate content. But where do the ideas for this content come from? How do you consistently come up with pertinent, meaningful blog post that keep your readers engaged and coax them into subscribing to your blog?
The best Blog writing tools may be tools that inspire ideas and bring pertinent blog post worthy ideas to your desktop. In the special post for the Carnival of Real Estate, I will share two of my favorite inspirational tools, Google Alerts, and Google Blog Search / Feed Reader.
Google Alerts is a free service available to any Google account holder that allows the user to choose specific search terms and ask Google to inform them via email, when this search term is used throughout
the Internet. To set up a search simply go to your Google home page and login. Next, at the very top left of your screen you will see the link “more.” Click on this and scroll all the way down to “even more.” Here, you will find on the very top left, “Alerts.” Choose alerts and it will take you to the alerts screen… Now, you will see a box on the upper left of the screen entitled, “Create a Google Alert.” Choose a search term, I chose Stockton Real Estate, or Stockton Foreclosure, or Stockton Housing… Choose “Comprehensive” to receive all the news from web pages, blogs, etc. and choose “Once a Day” to receive your alert daily. Enter your email address and press “Create Alert.” Voila. That is all there is to it.. Google will know keep track of any chatter, anywhere on the web and send you one email per day with links, and excerpts to the site it appeared on. AS you can tell, this is great information and a great way to aggregate information for your readers, or simply use the information for inspiration to create your own blog posts.
Google Reader, combined with RSS feeds and Googles Blog Search feature is another way to have pertinent information delivered to your desktop. If you have not downloaded Google Reader, it will really change the way you use your computer for news gathering and information. Google Reader is an RSS feed aggregator. Simply put, it displays any and all of your RSS feeds in one place, real-time for you to read. Now, if you are a bit behind on RSS, here is the short description. RSS stands for (among other things) Real Simple Syndication.
Almost every blog, news site and a fair amount of general information web sites have RSS feeds. RSS feeds are indicated by a small orange “chicklet” like the one shown to the right. IF you find a site that you feel is interesting, and would like to read more from the author(s), you simply click on the RSS chicklet and 
choose Google Reader. The site will now send all new content, (posts) as they are uploaded to your Google Reader… which know lives as part of your Google homepage. Even Microsoft Outlook 2007 includes the ability to capture RSS feeds. This allows you to keep up to date with all of your favorite blogs, and news sites, without having to go to each one, every day and see if there is any new content.
As, you can see, both Google Alerts and Google Reader (with RSS feeds) can offer you lots of daily news. And this news can be great fodder for additional blog posts. So keep your ideas fresh, current, and plentiful, with these two great services.
Content may be King… But Content Ideas are surely Queen!!
The 119th edition of the Carnival of Real Estate is posted at Housing Chronicles. There were 5 awards given for this week’s top posts, along with a few honorable mentions — head over and take a look to see who won the Mayflower Award for this week’s top post. You can see all of last week’s submissions here.
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