Readers, you can also read this article onmy website at this URL, 
http://www.mymarketingnotes.com/vault/content/view/29/38/

One of the most important skills of any marketer (or anyone 
else for that matter) is the ability to do research quickly, 
effectively and to communicate information that differs from 
what "the masses" do.

This article presents a 3 step strategy for using blogs to help 
in this.

Over the past year or so, blogs have become huge. Before the 
2004 U.S. election, scarce anyone heard of blogs. But with the 
bloggers doing their own version of the news, even computer 
illiterate people have at least heard of blogs.

So I want to talk about blogs. But not from the usual angle of 
creating and maintaining one. I want to talk about it from the 
standpoint of USING other people's blogs effectively.

If you already blog, then this will be obvious to you, though 
you might have been so focused on creation that you didn't pay 
attention to consumption. Common problem. I'm here to help you 
get past it.  :) 

The amazing thing about blogs - the good ones at least - is that 
they are like finding information gold mines.

The owners maintain them and their quality for several reasons.

* to generate new content that search engines love 
* to keep people coming back for more 
* to sell their stuff in a low pressure marketing context 
* self-fulfillment through self-expression

There are likely other reasons, but I consider these the 
relevant ones.

These motivations push the publishers to keep the quality of 
good blogs high. If they stop, their traffic dwindles. If they 
start hyping stuff, then the low-pressure context is gone.

Thus, it is that blogs form one of the most intensely useful 
sources of free information anywhere.

So the question is, do you effectively blog surf? And more to 
the point, how do you do it?

Well, I don't have THE ANSWER for how to do it. But I do have 
some suggestions that have generated great results for me.

1 - Google the following - with the punctuation as I show them:

+blog +"subject phrase"

Thus if I'm interested in blogs on fly fishing (a niche if there 
ever was one), my google would be

+blog +"fly fishing" (over 61,000 matches)

If my interest was in sequential autoresponders then my search 
would be:

+blog +"sequential autoresponders" (243 matches)

This gives me the ability to get a list of blogs on the subject 
which I then ...

2 - Bookmark for future reference. Create a folder for, say, fly 
fishing. All the high quality fly fishing blogs you find go into 
that folder. Make new folders for blogs on other subjects.

Now if I'm interested in seeing what's new in fly fishing, I go 
to my bookmarks and have a virtual field trip.

But there's one more thing I do, too. And this is critical if 
you want to keep your blog surfing fresh:

3 - Bookmark the search results page.

Why?

Because the results delivered up by the canned search will 
vary over time and as Google changes their criteria. The top 
blog today might turn out to be 5th next month and a complete 
newcomer might end up 1st on the list.

Now you have an effective method for blog surfing. Enjoy. 

Author info: Deepak Walia is a young internet entrepreneur 
who is silently making over $20,000 every month as an affiliate. 

Check his brand new forum where he is giving away some cool gifts 
just for posting useful content. 
==> http://www.mymarketingnotes.com/forums/