6 Ways To Keep Track Of What’s Trending In Your Niche

One of the best ways to get more attention, especially as a new blog, is to cover trending topics and the latest news in your niche.

The keywords for these stories are often brand new, so they’re easy to rank for. And you might even appear on Google’s News tab.

But to know what topics are trending in your niche, you need to know how to find them.

In this post, we cover several different methods you can use to track what’s happening in your niche.

How to track trending topics in your niche

Here are the methods we’ll cover to keep track of what’s trending in your niche:

1. Follow news sources in your niche.
2. Visit online forums related to your niche.
3. Keep up with the major brands in your niche.
4. Use Google Trends.
5. Follow social networks.
6. Use tools that allow you to track 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 to follow publications that are already putting their work into it.

This can include major news sources, depending on your niche, but will mostly include smaller publications, such as media sites related to your niche and blogs.

There are several different methods you can use to find these sources.

First, enter a keyword related to your niche into Google, then click on the News tab.

In the search bar, enter the broadest keyword for your niche, such as “wordpress” for the WordPress niche. You can also enter a recent news topic that you are familiar with, such as “wordpress update 6.5.”

Any publication you can find in that search result is a potential news source for your niche. Just study each page carefully to make sure it’s a reliable news source.

You can also use a service like SparkToro to find influential websites in your niche.

All you have to do is enter the same broad keyword that you entered into Google earlier.

SparkToro will list authoritative websites for your niche, as well as social media accounts, YouTube channels, podcasts, and subreddits that people who have searched for that keyword are likely to follow.

Don’t discount Medium either. Many writers choose to publish on Medium instead of their own sites.

Just type 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 any news source you find in your browser and then visit each one regularly to keep up with the latest news in your niche.

This is a rather time-consuming way to do it, and you might forget to visit each news source once in a while.

Consider using one or more of these methods instead:

• Feedly
• Newsletters
• Twitter list

Feedly is a news aggregator that you can use to keep up with the latest articles from almost any website. It even lets you organize the websites you follow into different feeds.

The app sorts each feed chronologically. If you have a premium subscription, you can instead sort each feed by popularity so that the most popular articles from each source are displayed first.

You can also see if each website has a newsletter you can subscribe to. That way, you can receive the latest articles from each source in your email inbox.

Twitter (now X) is another decent method for following news sources thanks to its list feature.

This feature allows you to organize the different accounts you follow into lists so that your Twitter feed is more manageable.

If your news sources promote their latest posts on Twitter, you can add each of them to a Twitter list and then review 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 that on media websites and blogs.

Some participate in online forums and in-person events, and since attending in-person events is inconvenient, forums are the best option.

Start with Reddit. They have subforums, known as “subreddits”, for almost every topic under the sun.

If there is a trending news in your niche, members from your niche must post 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 contains only one forum. This means that each forum will contain numerous sub-forums, one of which might be dedicated to news related to your niche.

Quora can also be a decent source for trending.

It’s not a great source of news, but if you pay attention to the questions users ask and the answers they get, you might catch emerging trends in your niche.

3. Keep up with the major brands in your niche

We won’t spend a lot of time on this section since it separates from the first section.

What we mean by “keeping up with the major brands in your niche” is simply using the 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 or talk about it on social media.

So, make a list of every brand in your niche. Then find out where they post news and updates.

Then follow those announcements however you like. 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 resource to use to find out if a topic is still relevant and how relevant it is now compared to back in 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 “outbound” topics that are related to your original search term.

This is how Google Trends helps you discover new topics in your niche.

5. Follow social networks

This is similar to our online forum monitoring section because social media is another place where members of your niche will discuss emerging trends and news topics.

This means that if you really want to spot these emerging stories, you should also follow social media.

You can do this by following influencers in your niche and searching for keywords related to your niche within each platform’s search box.

Fortunately, there is an easier way, but it will require a subscription to a social media management tool.

These tools allow you to pre-plan your social media posts and manage your cross-platform social media inbox from a single dashboard.

Some even have a feature called “social listening,” which is a feature we look for when it comes to tracking trending topics.

Each tool is different, but generally they allow you to track specific keywords and hashtags across different social media platforms.

Here are a few tools we’ve reviewed here at Blogging Wizard that offer a social listening feature:

6. 3 Tools to Monitor 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:

1. Google alerts – Sends you emails full of the latest articles that mention the keywords you’re tracking.
2. Failure – Enables cross-platform keyword tracking.
3. BuzzSumo – Allows you to track keywords and influencers in your niche.

Let’s briefly cover each of them.

1. Google alerts

Google Alerts are one of the best ways to automate your search for trending news topics in your niche.

All you have to do is follow all the keywords for which you want the latest news, 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 article links directly to your inbox at a frequency you choose.

2. Failure

we have a full review of Awario. It is primarily a brand tracking tool that allows you to track brand mentions online.

However, you can also use it to track specific keywords in your niche.

It lets you track mentions on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, the web, Reddit, Instagram and Vimeo.

Essentially, it allows you to monitor the discussions that members and influencers in your niche are having online from a single dashboard.

3. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is an all-in-one tool with features that focus on premium niche content.

Whether you want to discover top content in your niche, trending influencers, or even analyze your own content, you can use BuzzSumo to track it all.

For trending posts, go to the BuzzSumo Discover tab and open the Trending Feeds tool.

Then enter a keyword related to your niche into 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 works well.

Final thoughts

However you follow trending news, it’s well worth it.

Knowing what’s trending will help keep your editorial calendar full blog post ideas and YouTube video ideas that have the potential to attract readers/viewers.

I recommend trying to throw some of these in among any keyword-targeted content you have planned to keep a good balance.

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