How to Find Hot Topics for Articles or Blogs

If you're like me, you're always looking for ways to make money. Getting people to visit your website, blog, or other web content can be a way to put more money in your pocket. Assuming you know the proper SEO (search engine optimization) techniques, use keywords that line up with Google AdSense, and utilize LSI (latent semantic indexing), your web content is more than likely getting it's fair share of traffic and page views. For those of us who haven't yet mastered the SEO, LSI or keyword techniques, not all hope is lost. There is still a way to get your share of search engine hits and page views, and that tactic is to write about the latest hot news or trends.

Writing about breaking news, current events, and trends can be a good way to generate instant traffic to your website, blog, or other web content. But where is the best place to find these popular subjects? My favorite place is a site called Surcher.com. It's like having a free one-stop-shopping center for finding hot topics and popular keywords that people are using on search engines.

Surcher.com is the ultimate dashboard for discovering what subject matter is hot right now. The site pulls data from a plethora of other well-known sites and posts the results in an easy to use layout.

If you don't have a topic in mind, the front page of Surcher.com is a fantastic idea generator. The front page shows what is being searched for on well-known sites such as Google Trends, Yahoo Buzz, CNN Topics, Twitter, and Technorati. They show information from users looking for social media, blogs, pictures, news and video. The trend data is broken down into weekly, daily, "catching fire", and historical.

If you already have a topic in mind and just want to see how popular the topic is, then the site has a search feature where you can put in your own keyword or phrase. Then a "search meter" shows how popular the keyword or phrase is on rated different sources such as surcher, blogs, and twitter. Their rating scale is from 1 - 10, with 1 being not hot at all to 10 being super hot. I searched on the term "Jennifer Aniston" and the meter on surcher gave an 8, blogs were a 7, and twitter was a 9.

My "Jennifer Aniston" phrase returned popularity hits in the categories of Social Websites, Products, Pictures, News, Blogs, and Video. Social Websites that mentioned her were Digg, Delicious, and Twitter. Products about her were searched for on Ebay and Amazon. Picture sites people looked for her on were Flickr, Photobucket, and Pixsy. News about her was looked for on Newsvine, Wikio, and YahooNews. Blogs that mentioned her name were Technorati, IceRocket, and Blogsearch. Video searches on her name were done on Youtube and Truveo.

Hopefully I have demonstrated how useful Surcher.com can be to a writer. The site also has potential for a vast array of uses besides simply generating ideas for content, but that is what I use it for most often.

So, use SEO & LSI skills and align your keywords with Google AdSense if you are talented in those areas. If not, then consider using Surcher.com to find popular search engine terms to utilize when writing articles or blogs. Just remember that today's "hot" could be tomorrow's "cold". Fads and trends tend to fade over time, so make sure you are also writing about "evergreen" topics. Evergreen stories will continue to bring visitors to your web content even after the initial frenzy over your hot news topic or trend fades into the sunset.

Source: Surcher.com