How Alltop Powers Bloggers

Guy Kawasaki isn’t just the author of Reality Check, his latest nifty book about kicking your competition’s butt. He’s a tinkerer and entrepreneur. I’ve been in love with his Alltop since it first came out ( I first talked about Alltop here). As time goes on, I think of more ways to use the service.

Tonight, for instance, I got curious about search engine optimization (SEO). I thought about googling the term, but realized that would dump me into lots of commercial products, software, and worse. So, I thought about Alltop. I typed in http://seo.alltop.com, and it popped up all the various search blogs out there. Instantly, I had what I needed.

I spoke with Guy about this recently, just how much it’s changed the way I blog, and the way I research. We thought about how else it might empower bloggers, and here’s what we came up with:

Top 10 Ways Alltop Powers Bloggers

1. Keep track of what your competitors are writing about. Alltop displays the last five stories of over one-hundred sites and blogs for topics ranging from adoption to zoology with 400 topics in between>

2. Examine the site design of bloggers in your category by clicking through on headlines and seeing their sites. For example, if you’re a mommy blogger, you can see what hundreds of mommy blogs look like at Moms.alltop.

3. Get more traffic by getting added to an Alltop topic. Go here to sign up.

4. Grab blogging tips by reading what expert bloggers like CopyBlogger and ProBlogger are saying at Blogging.alltop.

5. Stay on top of what’s happening in SEO, SEM, content marketing, social media, and corporate blogs.

6. Stay on top of what the big personalities like Seth Godin, Robert Scoble, Tara Hunt, and Dave Winer are saying at Egos.alltop.

7. Compare the quality of your headlines to other bloggers’ headlines. If your headlines don’t stand out in Alltop, they won’t in any feed reader.

8. Keep track of what’s happening on Twitter by monitoring the top one hundred Twitter personalities on Twitterati.alltop

9. Find story ideas from other areas. For example, you can find a study about psychology and then blog about how people can apply it to marketing.

10. Provide fresh content to your readers with no hassle by installing an Alltop widget in your sidebar. These widgets deliver the five most popular stories of the day from 400 topics. (This one was one of Guy’s. I haven’t installed one yet. Have you?)

So that’s our list. There are all kinds of other things I use it for, like finding out where I should be commenting more, and discovering what I might want more information about. It hasn’t let me down yet, and with the passionate team Guy has working on keeping the Internet’s best magazine rack well stocked, I feel like it’s not going to stop serving me up stuff to read any time soon.

Are you using Alltop in other strategic ways? Have you used it as a way to share your stuff with less tech-centric friends or business colleagues? What else should be on my list?

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