Online Research Tools

21 Online Research Tools Coming Soon

Amazon

Amazon allows you to view the bestsellers in all its categories and sub-categories. It’s a very powerful tool, whether you’re looking for physical products to sell or write about. It’s equally powerful if you’re thinking of creating an information product on a certain topic. Amazon Best Sellers

Blog Catalog

Blog Catalog is useful for finding blogs on certain topics, so you can add them to your RSS reader for research and topic ideas. They claim to be the largest user-submitted blog directory.

Clickbank Marketplace

Clickbank is a marketplace of digital products (software, information, etc.). What’s handy about the marketplace, in terms of generating content ideas, is that they list products according to popularity.  Of course, that is not a foolproof way to see what topics are most popular (as opposed to who has better marketing/copywriting), but it can help you put together some possible ideas and observe the marketing and sales copy of those top sellers as well.

Comscore

Comscore provides information on the behaviours of Internet users and consumers worldwide. The data is based on approximately 2 million consumers who have volunteered to have their behaviour tracked. If you navigate to the Products & Services page at http://comscore.com/Products_Services, you can see the main categories of intelligence they provide.

Delicious

Delicious is a bookmarking site that allows users to bookmark pages that they find interesting. The site makes it easy for you to see what is most popular amongst users. They claim to have the “biggest collection of bookmarks in the universe.”

Digg

Digg.com is a more sophisticated bookmarking site where you users bookmark and rank content as well. You can customize your experience at the site and you can subscribe for category updates via RSS.

eBay Pulse

eBay Pulse at allows you to see the most popular searches, largest stories and most watched items. This information can help you decide what items to sell on eBay or if you’re an eBay affiliate, it may help you shape the content you create.

eHow

eHow.com is a large website with “how to” articles on a wide variety of topics and is a good source of content ideas. They are known to have good search engine rankings and provide clues to some of the more popular topics you might create content about. You can also search for topics. Once you select your topic, you can customize your search for articles or videos.

EzineArticles

Ezine Articles is a human-edited database of articles of nearly 300,000 thousand authors. It’s useful for finding ideas for your own content and seeing which keyword phrases writers are targeting. Many authors try to use Ezine Articles authority to gain top rankings for keyword phrases and those keyword phrases often appear in the titles of articles.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts are a handy way to receive updates on newly indexed content on topics / keywords of your choosing. Updates are sent via email, at a frequency you choose. Go to http://google.com/alerts to get started.

Google Blog Search

Google Blog Search uses Google’s search technology to index and display content from blogs around in the world, in a variety of languages. It’s useful for finding popular stories