If you want to be a professional blogger looking to generate an online income but confused about which niche is highly profitable, then, you are reading the right information now. Creating News blog is the right way.
A news blog is a good foundation to start with because you’ll never run out of content ideas. In addition, there is an abundance of material that makes your content research quicker.
How to Find the Focus of Your News Blog
News blogs are fast-paced blogs which track, aggregate and disseminate current news on a set range of topics. Their main selling points are comprehensiveness and timeliness: a good news blog must cover the field thoroughly and speedily by pointing readers to the new information or developments.
Content for news blog published regularly on a daily basis and sometimes multiple times on a single day. Apart from the value of the actual opinions offered by news bloggers, people subscribe to or follow these news blogs largely because they help them to stay on top of current issues, innovations or ideas concerning an industry.
If you’re interested in a specific field, publishing a news blog forces you to keep up with what other people are talking about. It’s different from just reading other blogs because you’ll participate by contributing your own ideas or opinions. Doing news blog is a good way for you to build a strong online reputation.
Let us look at how you can create a list of news sources for your news blog. I’ve broken the entire process in 8 points: you can choose to only use some of these sources although I would reckon exploring all of them if you have the time.
How to Find the Source for Your News Blog
The only essential tool you really need as a news blogger is a robust RSS feed reader. It is very time consuming to check multiple websites several times a day for new content and the easiest way to go about it is to pull all the content into one cohesive location, which is your feed reader.
Whenever possible, you should always subscribe to news source’s web feed and categorize it accordingly in your feed reader. If you don’t use a feed reader, I recommend Feedly and Feed Reader.
Here are the 8 information sources you can use for your news blog.
1. Other Blogs in the Same Niche
One of the best ways to find interesting news for your news blog is to subscribe to other blogs in your niche. This includes both other news blogs and non-news blogs and I suggest that you pay extra attention to blogs which specialize in a sub-niche because they are usually the ones who publish unique content worth mentioning.
There are several ways to find other blogs in your niche:
- Search Engines: Do a search for topic + ‘blog’ using Google.com or try their blog search engine, which allows you to do a focused search so that you can only look for blogs with the topic keyword.
- This increases the relevance of the search results. Other blog search engines you can use include Ask.com, which allows you to sort results according to popularity.
- Blogrolls: Some of the blogs in your niche will have blog Rolls or a ‘links page’ with links to other relevant blogs or news sources. This is an excellent way to surf around and find other relevant blogs which cover the same topic.
- Blog directories: A simple Google search for ‘blog directory’ will give you a good amount of sites to look through.
- If you’re using a directory, the most important thing is to make sure that the blog is still active. Don’t be surprised if you find lots of dormant sites sitting in blog directories. In fact, the blog directories too vanish after a year or two but still, they are listed in the search results.
- Personal Recommendations: Sometimes the easiest way is to ask your friends or members of a forum for recommendations on sites you should check out. The benefit of personal recommendations is that you’ll almost always come across good weblogs and are active. It’s a good way to weed out most of the junk.
- Social News and Bookmarking Websites
Social news sites get launched every now and then. However, most of them are bubbles that burst too soon than expected. Very few stay afloat for a longer duration such as Digg and Newsvine. In many ways, it is a catch 22.
Check out each social news website and subscribe to the front page or the appropriate category of news.
Social bookmarking websites will display what their users bookmark online and all these links are organized by tags. Content on social bookmarking sites is not always current but it’s a good place to find some obscure gems. The best way to process this information is to subscribe to these tags and put them in your feed reader. Don’t waste time surfing around and actively looking for content.
- Keyword Watch Lists
This refers to the monitoring of specific key phrases or keywords related to your news blog in order to pick up on relevant news. Google Alerts is a watch list; it can email you with links quite frequently on an ‘as-it-happens’ basis.
- Meme Trackers
Meme trackers are websites which organize blog posts on specific topics according to an automatic algorithm that determines which articles are cited or discussed the most.
Not clear?
Here, visit this link from Wikipedia. May be it will shed brighter light. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetracker
They give you a general overview of what’s being discussed in a specific niche at the moment. This is useful when you want to write a quick news post in your news blog and want to reference other blogs talked about it. Examples of meme trackers include Techmeme. Subscribe to the RSS feed for each meme-tracker and monitor them a few times a day. They are a convenient source of content ideas and news.
- News Aggregators
News aggregators do that exactly-aggregate news based on your selection of keywords. They pull in RSS feeds to centralize them in one location online.
- Online Newspapers and Magazines
Online newspapers and magazines will provide you with a lot of news on your chosen topic and it is a good resource to news blogs and social news websites.
For example, if you’re running a celebrity gossip website , you should subscribe to the Daily Mail and People.com, both of which are sites with a strong emphasis on celebrity and other tabloid-style news.
Remember to subscribe to online magazine/newspaper feeds according to the specific news category and not to the whole news paper.
- Press Releases and Media Contacts
Monitor Press Release sites like PR News Wire, which offers well categorized RSS feeds for specific industries. Press releases are great sources of direct information from both large companies and small businesses to create content for your news blog.
- Google Hot Trends
Thousands of bloggers use Google hot trends for their news blog content. This is a very valuable tool for gathering hot news.
Some of the categories for your news blog:
Sports
Celebrities’ gossip
Entertainment
Internet
Social networking
Stock market tips
Odd news
If you systematically follow this short guide and persist for at least two years in spite of low or no income, you will have a real online business with your news blog on your lap .
