Niche Research Tools: Finding Hot Topics for Blog Posts

I’ve told you before that I like to use auto-pilot sites and blogs to bring in passive income. I’ve gotten a lot of questions about how I find great niches to attack with these auto-pilot sites. I addressed these questions in the auto-pilot group, and I thought I’d mention them to you because they can be used in conjunction with keyword research to find hot blog topics to post about. Hot topics with low competition equals traffic to your blog!

Before I mention these free research tools, if you have any interest in earning passive income from auto-pilot sites, you’ll want to check out the auto-pilot members group (and claim two free case study e-books).

Believe me when I tell you that finding a good niche isn’t easy, but it very much becomes second nature after you do it for a few months. You begin to notice patterns here and there, which lead to hunches, and those hunches can then be validated pretty easily. Provided you know how to validate them.

So here are some of the free online services I use to validate my niche research. Using these services will alert you to what people are searching for today, and if you can tie what they want to one of your new blog posts, you can capitalize on this extra search traffic.

So here they are, in no particular order:

Yahoo! Buzz
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http://buzzlog.buzz.yahoo.com/overall/

The Lycos 50
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http://50.lycos.com/

Google Trends
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http://google.com/trends

Trendhunter Popular List
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http://www.trendhunter.com/popular

AOL Hot Searches
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http://hotsearches.aol.com/

eBay Pulse
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http://pulse.ebay.com/

current.com’s Google Current
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http://current.com/topics/76253632_google_current?sort=currentness

Barnes & Noble Bestseller List
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http://www.barnesandnoble.com/bestsellers/top100.asp

You probably noticed a pattern in the above, which should point to another success factor that you should try to address with your niche research: find a hot niche, attack it quickly, and generate traffic ASAP. That’s how you capture search traffic and Page Rank. Provided that your blog is seeded with content and you’re using the Google XML Sitemap plug-in, your new posts should be ranking in Google’s index very quickly.