It’s no secret that I love using blogs to gather competitive intelligence. In any single Internet marketing campaign at any time, I don’t spend a single penny until I have found at least 10 or 15 blogs that relate to whatever it is I’m selling. I read through each and every one of those blogs for at least three or four days usually longer; more like a week. If I have a lot of time before the marketing campaign begins I’ll spend as much as two to three weeks reading blogs within the industry.
You can find out so much about your industry, your niche, your market, your product, and your potential customers, just by reading a few blogs that relate to whatever it is you’re selling. The hardest part is finding those specific blogs that relate to your specific industry. And that’s what I’m going to talk about today in this article.
So the question remains, how can you find specific blogs that relate to your specific industry or product?
Well there are two or three places that I like to go to search for blogs on any given industry. The first is Technorati, which is a sort of search engine for blogs. Go to their website and you can see that it’s very easy to search for blogs. Just type at the top of the page and away you go. Now if I were you I would type in my specific keyword that I’m targeting first of all, or you can type in the industry name you are in, or a generic product name that relates to your product… the point is just get in there and poke around and figured out how things work. I have no idea how many blogs Technorati has indexed but it is many many millions. In July 2006 Technorati announced that they were tracking over 50 million blogs.
Now that’s been 3 1/2 years so you can imagine how many more are in there. Especially in the last couple of years blogging has really exploded, so if it’s out there you can expect to find it at Technorati.
The next two places that I use are probably more obvious. The first one is Google. You can use Google to find everything and anything and I’m sure you already know how to do that, so I won’t spend any more time talking about it.
But there may be a feature of Google that you don’t know about and it’s the third place that I used to find blogs. It’s called Google blog search, which I think is very aptly named. Don’t you just love how Google names things? They don’t mess around fancy names do they? Google blog search, Google talk, Google voice, Google Mail, Google analytics, they generally don’t spend any money on marketing brand names. But I’m getting off the point…
You can find Google blog search by just going to Google and typing in Google blog search. It will be the first thing that comes up I promise you. Get in there and play around with it; search for a few things and you’ll find it is a very useful tool to have when looking for blogs as a competitive research tool.
And that’s it! Those are the three places that I use most of the time to search for blogs on any given industry from a competitive research point of view. I hope you found this helpful, and thanks for reading.
Jason has been writing articles online for over thirteen years. When not writing about Internet Marketing, Jason runs web site dedicated to teaching about donating cars to charity where he can show you why and how to give car to charity and reap an awesome tax reward!