One of the most important skills of any marketer (or anyone else for that matter) is the ability to do research quickly, effectively and to communicate information that differs from what “the masses” do.

This article presents a 3 steps strategy for using blogs to help in this.

Over the past year or so, blogs have become huge. Before the 2004 U.S. election, scarce anyone heard of blogs. But with the bloggers doing their own version of the news, even computer illiterate people have at least heard of blogs.

So I want to talk about blogs. But not from the usual angle of creating and maintaining one. I want to talk about it from the standpoint of USING other people’s blogs effectively.

If you already blog, then this will be obvious to you, though you might have been so focused on creation that you didn’t pay attention to consumption. Common problem. I’m here to help you get past it. :)

The amazing thing about blogs - the good ones at least - is that they are like finding information gold mines.

The owners maintain them and their quality for several reasons.

- To generate new content that search engines love
- To keep people coming back for more
- To sell their stuff in a low pressure marketing context
- Self-fulfillment through self-expression

There are likely other reasons, but I consider these the relevant ones.

These motivations push the publishers to keep the quality of good high. If they stop, their traffic dwindles. If they start hyping stuff, then the low-pressure context is gone.

Thus, it is that blogs form one of the most intensely useful sources of free information anywhere.

So the question is, do you effectively blog? And more to the point, how do you do it?

Well, I don’t have THE ANSWER for how to do it. But I do have some suggestions that have generated great results for me.

1 - Google the following - with the punctuation as I show them:

+blog +”subject phrase”

Thus if I’m interested in blogs on fly fishing (a niche if there ever was one), my google would be

+blog +”fly fishing” (over 61,000 matches)

If my interest was in sequential autoresponders then my search would be:

+blog +”sequential autoresponders” (243 matches)

This gives me the ability to get a list of blogs on the subject which I then …

2 - Bookmark for future reference. Create a folder for, say, fly fishing. All the high quality fly fishing blogs you find go into that folder. Make new folders for blogs on other subjects.

Now if I’m interested in seeing what’s new in fly fishing, I go to my bookmarks and have a virtual field trip. But there’s one more thing I do, too. And this is critical if you want to keep your blogging fresh:

3 - Bookmark the search results page.

Why?

Because the results delivered up by the canned search will vary over time and as Google changes their criteria. The top blog today might turn out to be 5th next month and a complete newcomer might end up 1st on the list.

Now you have an effective method for blogging.

Enjoy.

C) Copyright 2005 by Walia D.

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