Way back in 2005, I blogged about a market research tip – basically, using a resource – PubSub for market research. PubSub was one of the earliest and at that time, hip blog aggregators. It was pretty nice. They help you track what’s being discussed in the blogosphere and had neat little time charts so you can tell how popular the keyword you want to monitor is doing over a certain period of time.

I don’t know if PubSub is still active – their website won’t come up for me. Regardless, it’s a good reminder if you haven’t already been doing it. Blogs are really good for market research. Now, granted, you must take things like news and competitor information with a pinch of salt. Still, there’s valuable information to be gleaned like what people are saying about you, or your products, or your industry.

Also, when you feel article or blog ideas drying up, the blog world is a great place to look for ideas.

Today, there are many more options – thankfully. One of the easiest is use Google Alerts which is free and it will send you email notifications each time it finds something matching what you want to track. Track names, domains, URLs, or any keyword you’re interested in.

What I like about Alerts like these is, you don’t have to review everything as they come in and anybody can do it. My husband is prime example of this. He’s very green at Internet Marketing but in the short time he’s been involved in it, he’s already stored away tons of content ideas. Just by setting up a special folder in his email where all these alerts come in. When he has time, he’ll look through these folders and review them. Eventually, he has a pretty good idea what the market is looking for and what he will offer them.