If you blog you know how hard it can be to come up with a fresh topic to blog about. You know you ought to blog, but you sit here staring at this white space trying to figure out what you can write about. Clearly, with respect to small businesses, you want people to find your blog, read it, and come back regularly to get to know and trust you and ultimately do business with you. So how to write a creative post that will grab people’s attention?

One option suggested it to write a commentary or post on current trends with the idea that people searching for information on that topic will find your blog. That’s all well and good, but how do you find something that is hot right now and then apply it to your business? Never fear, I have a solution for you. Check out a new search option from Google called Collecta.

With Collecta you get real-time results that are constantly being updated as new information is published across the internet. The home page itself shows what is hot right now. Each listing shows a story, a comment made on a social media application, an update made via twitter, and/or a photo uploaded somewhere. As time progresses new things are added to each listing.

Read a couple of the articles or comments and see if there is a way for you to make a business application to what you do. The hot items won’t always be relevant to what you do. It might be a stretch to take an article about Lady Gaga (hot item right now) to your plumbing business, but something she says or someone says about her may spark an idea for a powerful analogy.

If nothing fits you do also do a search for terms that are related to your industry. Maybe you discover a piece of legislation in your state or nationally that is making big news. You can reference that and right a post as an expert in your industry. Maybe you discover a recent scam and you want to address those fears and how your business would handle a customer relationship in that situation. There is always something you can find and by writing posts on relevant topics that are hot right now it increases your possibility of someone finding your blog searching for such a hot topic.

Give it a try and as always, leave comments below.

It’s official! Social Media has reached outer space! This past Friday NASA astronaut Doug “Wheels” Wheelock checked in with Foursquare from the International Space Station and unlocked the “NASA Explorer” badge. But even before this NASA was using twitter so I think we can safely conclude that social media is alive and well in outer space. Case in point: earlier this year astronaut T.J. Creamer sent the first tweet from space. Wheelock is also a prolific tweeter via his Twitter account, which has more than 43,000 followers. Here is video of Wheelock’s check-in:

If my information is correct, once Wheelock returns to Earth in November, regular “earthlings” will be able to unlock this badge by exploring NASA sites throughout the country. Back for the last several weeks of September I discussed the business use of Foursquare. NASA is giving a free scoop of astronaut ice cream when you show this badge. That is the PERFECT business use of Foursquare. If NASA is using it why aren’t you? If you missed it here are the posts to review:

How to Increase Customer Loyalty with Little to No Cost, Part 1

How to Increase Customer Loyalty with Little to No Cost, Part 2

How does Foursquare compare to other location based services?

Usually I try not to overload you with too much material in too many posts each week. I’ve already posted this morning, but I’m posting again. It’s funny because I’m posting about a free giveaway contest on another blog where you can win a free $75 gift card to Lowes by commenting on her post, tweeting about it, posting to Facebook, and posting to your blog. Four chances to win. I don’t normally promote a other people’s contests on this blog and certainly not one that has absolutely nothing to do with helping local businesses market online.  And yet, here I am doing it. Why? Well, I want to win the gift card.

Now that makes me think about free contest giveaways. Have you done one on your business blog? If not think about adding this to the mix. It clearly has to be something of value. If it is a good one then word will spread and you are likely to pick up some new readers to your blog who otherwise would not have discovered it. That’s why it is best if has something to do with the theme of your blog. For example, the contest above is for a Lowe’s gift card and her blog often talks about DIY projects she likes or is doing in her home. If it weren’t for this contest I probably would not have come across her blog any time soon. Now that I have I’m going to have to check things out to see if her blog is something I’d like to subscribe to and read regularly.

So, how can you use this example to run your contest on your business blog to encourage people to spread the word and attract a few new readers?

Last week I discussed alternatives for searching Twitter. This week I wanted to do the same for Facebook. More businesses are using Facebook to reach customers. It only makes sense that these business research and search for trends and topics pertaining to their business. I’m not aware of any way to narrow the search by geography which would be a much bigger benefit to local businesses so for now this will only help in the broadest sense or for those that market online across state lines.

Let me add a disclaimer here: This information is not intended for morally questionable activities, but she be used for the betterment of your business. Ill-advised would included things like “My new number is,” “new email,” and “MSN addy.” We’ve probably all seen the posts of friends who got a new cell phone and they post their number requesting all their friends to text them so they can add their contact info to the new phone. That’s all fine and good if only friends can see it, but unfortunately many have not customized their privacy settings and this will show up in open churches. This could be very dangerous especially for young children. What I’m talking about is doing searches for your business name, product, industry, etc. to find conversations that apply to your market. In some instances you may be able to enter to the dialogue and lend your expertise to the conversation. Let me also add that if any user adjusts their privacy settings to show posts ONLY to Friends or Friends of Friends, then those users will not be included in this search functionality.

Ok, let’s get on with it. I believe the most well known one in this category is OpenBook. Incidentally, if you try to link to this site inside of a Facebook post you will receive a message that this has been marked as spam by multiple users and will not be allowed. The stated purpose of this site was to help make Facebook aware of how their privacy settings can harm people and make people aware of this very settings. We’re going to piggy back on this to conduct some business research of our key terms. Seeing conversations may spark new ideas for your business or ideas for things you can blog about.

Another lesser known option is gabberface. The results for my test searches appear to be the same. The main difference is OpenBook allows you to separate search results by gender and GabberFace does not. Additionally, there are some annoying advertisements on this site.

Another option currently in beta mode at the time of this writing is facepinch. Search results again seem to the be same and it also has the annoying advertisements. However, the feature I really like about this one are the additional search options across the top. You can see the 100 most popular searches on Facebook, the 100 Hottest Trending topics updated every 5 minutes real time, and Popular Likes among others. These would be particularly helpful when creating a blog post. See what people are talking about and searching for right now and figure out a way you can apply that to your business. Maybe it applies directly or maybe there is an applicable comparison or analogy. Then you post to your Facebook Business Page and people searching may end up at your blog. I cannot remember who said this, but they called it the “Oprah Effect”. You know she has a book club and whatever book she recommends then sales go up. Or whatever topic she discusses on her show becomes a top search online for people wanting to find more info about it. That person’s suggestion was to watch Oprah and then do a blog post about her hot topic and tie it back into your business. That could be a bit of a stretch, but you see the application here. Find out what people are talking about on Facebook and see if it applies to your business.

As always, I’d love to hear your comments and thoughts below. Thanks!

Everyone is familiar with conducting searches through Google or your favorite search engine. But what about conducting business research specially in Twitter to see how others are talking about your business or your competitor. Today I want to introduce an alternative method for conducting Twitter searches. Back at the end of June I discussed a more efficient method of conducting searches and research on Twitter. See the original post here.

In my earlier post I explained how to expand the search results further back into the past. Searchtastic also allows you to search tweets going back months. The neat thing about this tool is that you can export tweets to an excel file. This alone is worth bookmarking this and using to track, study, build reports, and conduct data mining. You can also click one of the buttons along the top to see the current top 100, 200, 300, or 400 Twitter users based on the number of followers. This is pretty interesting to see as well though I’m not quite certain of a specific business application this feature would provide to you.

Anyway, nothing earth shattering today, but sometimes the little things like this can and do lead to the biggest results. Add this to your list of tools if you are marketing on Twitter.