The old cliché of Content is King is still very much on the forefront of most people’s minds, yet when it comes down to it, content is a difficult animal to tame. Thinking of things to write about consistently can take us just as long as the writing itself.

If you are a one man band this is not good. You have other fires to fight and things to do. So how can you automate part of the researching and thinking elements of the process? Here are a couple of ideas that we use to help us with ideas:

Google Alerts.

Signup with Google alerts and have then send you a daily email relating to news and blog post around your major keywords. You won’t get every bit of news under the sun but it will give you some ideas, I’m sure. You can do the same with yahoo too but I have not found them to be especially different so stick with one or the other, after all you don’t need to bombard yourself with email.

RSS Feeds

Visit blogs or sites in your target niche, even competitors and signup to as many of the RSS Feeds as you can. Choose an RSS aggregator such as Google Reader or Bloglines so you can search through the various feeds if you have an idea and see what others are saying.

Twitter

Yes Twitter, I have found twitter to be an excellent source of links and resources that others in my niche are sharing. If you use FireFox , install TwitterFox and tweets appear on your desktop as they happen. Signup to “follow” anyone in your industry. Use www.twellow.com to search out people and follow them, then take it one stage further and look to see who they are following and follow some of them too! You will be amazed at the stuff some people share.

Well there are three simple ideas you can implement in the next 10 minutes to start automatically researching your niche and having technology give you ideas for your content writing

About the Author

I have spent the last 12 years working with Finance and Insurance companies using the Internet. I have also worked in that time or consulted with all of the major Insurance and Finance aggregators including MoneySupermarket, Confused, MoneyExtra, Moneynet and others...