One of the best ways to gain more traction, especially as a new blog, is to cover trending topics and breaking news stories in your niche.
Keywords for these stories are often brand new, so they’re easy to rank for. And you may even appear in Google’s News tab.
But in order to know what topics are trending in your niche, you need to know how to find them.
In this post, we cover a few different methods you can use to keep track of what’s happening in your niche.
How to keep track of trending topics in your niche
Here are the methods we’ll be covering on how to keep track of what’s trending in your niche:
- Follow news sources in your niche.
- Visit online forums related to your niche.
- Keep up with major brands in your niche.
- Use Google Trends.
- Monitor social media.
- Use tools that allow you to monitor trending topics in any niche.
1. Follow news sources in your niche
One of the best ways to keep up with what’s happening in your niche is by following publications who are already putting in the work.
This may include major news sources, depending on your niche, but it will mostly include smaller publications, such as media sites related to your niche and blogs.
There are a few different methods you can use to find these sources.
First, enter a keyword related to your niche into Google, then click over to the News tab.
Enter your niche’s most broad keyword into the search bar, such as “wordpress” for the WordPress niche. You can also enter a recent news topic you’re familiar with, such as “wordpress update 6.5.”
Every publication you can find in that search result is a potential news source for your niche. Just be sure to study each site carefully to ensure they’re a trusted news source.
You can also use a service like SparkToro to find influential websites in your niche.
All you need to do is enter the same broad keyword you entered into Google earlier.
SparkToro will list authoritative websites for your niche as well as social media accounts, YouTube channels, podcasts and subreddits people who searched for that keyword are likely to follow.
Don’t discount Medium, either. A lot of writers choose to publish to Medium instead of their own sites.
Just enter a news topic into Medium’s search bar to find a few additional sources to follow.
How to keep up with news sources
You can bookmark each news source you find in your browser, then visit each one on a regular basis to keep up with the latest news stories in your niche.
This is a pretty time consuming way to go about this, and you might wind up forgetting to visit each news source from time to time.
Consider using one or more of these methods instead:
- Feedly
- Newsletters
- Twitter list
Feedly is a news aggregator you can use to keep up with almost any website’s latest articles. It even allows you to organize the websites you follow into different feeds.
The app sorts each feed chronologically. If you have a premium subscription, you can sort each feed by popularity instead so that each source’s most popular articles display first.
You can also see if each website has a newsletter you can subscribe to. That way, you can receive each source’s latest articles in your email inbox.
Twitter (now X) is another decent method for keeping up with news sources due to its Lists feature.
This feature allows you to organize different accounts you follow into Lists so your Twitter feed is easier to manage.
If your news sources promote their latest posts to Twitter, you can add each one of them to a Twitter list, then view that list regularly to keep up with the latest topics in your niche.
2. Visit online forums related to your niche
The community of almost every niche in the world is very active. They just don’t always do it on media websites and blogs.
Some participate in online forums and in-person events, and since attending in-person events is inconvenient, forums are your best bet.
Start with Reddit. They have subforums, known as “subreddits,” for nearly every topic under the sun.
If there are trending news stories in your niche, members from your niche are bound to make posts about it on Reddit.
You can also search for forums related to your niche on Google by searching for “[niche] + forums”, such as “fishing forums”.
Forums are much more organized than subreddits since each one only contains a single forum. This means each forum will contain numerous subforums, one of which might be dedicated to news related to your niche.
Quora may also be a decent source for tracking trends.
It’s not a great news source, but if you pay attention to the questions users ask and the answers they receive, you may catch on to emerging trends in your niche.
3. Keep up with major brands in your niche
We aren’t going to spend much time on this section since it piggybacks off of the first section.
What we mean by “keeping up with major brands in your niche” is simply using brands in your niche as a news source.
When brands release new products or updates to their products and services, they often publish a blog post about it or talk about it on social media.
So, make a list of every brand in your niche. Then, find out where they announce news and updates.
Then, follow those announcements however you wish. You can bookmark their announcement page, subscribe to their newsletter or follow them on social media.
4. Use Google Trends
Google Trends is a fantastic source to use to find out if any topic is still relevant and how relevant it is now compared to as far back as 2004.
You can even search by country or worldwide or change the search spectrum to Google News, Images or Shopping.
If you scroll past the initial graph, you’ll find “breakout” topics that are related to your original search term.
This is how Google Trends helps you discover emerging topics in your niche.
5. Monitor social media
This is similar to our section on monitoring online forums in that social media is another place where members of your niche will discuss emerging trends and news topics.
This means if you really want to spot these emerging stories, you should monitor social media as well.
You can do this by following influencers in your niche and by searching for keywords related to your niche within each platform’s search box.
Fortunately, there’s an easier way, but it’ll require subscribing to a social media management tool.
These tools allow you to schedule social media posts in advance and manage your social media inbox from multiple platforms from a single dashboard.
Some even have a feature called “social listening,” which is the feature we’re looking for when it comes to monitoring trending topics.
Each tool is different, but in general, they allow you to monitor specific keywords and hashtags on different social media platforms.
Here are a few tools we’ve reviewed here on Blogging Wizard that offer a social listening feature:
6. 3 tools for monitoring trending topics in your niche
If you want to automate your search for trending topics in your niche, or at least make it a little easier, consider using one or more of these tools:
- Google Alerts – Sends you emails filled with the latest articles that mention keywords you follow.
- Awario – Lets you monitor keywords across multiple platforms.
- BuzzSumo – Allows you to monitor keywords and influencers in your niche.
Let’s briefly cover each one.
1. Google Alerts
Google Alerts is one of the best ways to automate your search for trending news topics in your niche.
All you need to do is follow any broad keywords you want the latest news stories for, then choose how often you want to receive alerts.
Google Alerts will alert you whenever new web content is published under your chosen keywords and send links to the articles directly to your inbox at the frequency you chose.
2. Awario
We have a full review of Awario. It’s primarily a brand monitoring tool that allows you to keep track of brand mentions online.
However, you can also use it to follow specific keywords in your niche.
It allows you to monitor mentions on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, the web, Reddit, Instagram and Vimeo.
It essentially allows you to monitor the discussions members and influencers of your niche are having online from a single dashboard.
3. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a multipurpose tool with features that focus on a niche’s top content.
Whether you want to discover the top content in your niche, trending influencers or even analyze your own content, you can use BuzzSumo to monitor all of it.
For trending posts, go to BuzzSumo’s Discover tab, and open the Trending Feeds tool.
Then, enter a keyword related to your niche in the search bar to find trending social media posts.
This tool can be hit or miss with certain niches, but when it gets right, it does it well.
Final thoughts
However you keep track of trending news, it’s well worth doing.
Knowing what’s trending will help you keep your editorial calendar topped up with blog post ideas and YouTube video ideas that have the potential to attract readers/viewers.
I’d recommend trying to slot some of these in amongst any keyword-focused content you have planned to maintain a good balance.
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