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You can look at the questions that people leave online and then review the answers.  You will find that some of the questions that people ask haven’t been answered and if you know the answer or know where to get the answer, you can leave a constructive response.  If, you do this often enough on a variety of websites where people are seeking a solution to their problems, you will over a period of frequent participation become somewhat of an authority, or at the very least, someone others look to for answers and advice.

You can even get traffic to your site from the participation on many of these sites that cater to answering people questions.  Some of the sites allow you to complete a profile and leave your web address and at the very least, some even allow you to have a non-affiliate link signature at the bottom of your posts.  Even if the site doesn’t allow you to have a link to your website or an affiliate link in your signature, you could always elect to have a username like, “yourwebsitenamedotcom,” but that may be a bit blatant, so you could tone your username for the site down to something like, “yourwebsitename,” so long as that doesn’t violate the site’s terms of service or use.  I’ve gotten more than a few visitors to my sites that way.  Remember, human beings by their nature are a curious bunch and that includes the way they behave online too!

Here are the 25 Best Places To Find The Pulse of the Internet In Real Time:

1)  Google Zeitgeist, aka, Google Trends

I really am addicted to Google Trends because it gives you an hour-by-hour snapshot of the Top 100 searches by keyword on Google.  It gives you what keyword people are searching for at that moment and updates every hour.  Google Trends is a very powerful tool, because keywords direct people to the most relevant sites containing those keywords in its content.

When you click on any one of the Top 100 search entries, it will take you to the “keyword page” that has on the left-hand side of the page the leading news sources for that keyword and on the right-side of the page, you’ll get the most relevant blogs and websites covering the keyword that people are searching for.  More than often, I have used Google Trends as a way to monetize a freshly-registered domain name and have the domain name pay for itself in a matter of days, if not hours.  If, you’d like to know more about that, leave a comment and maybe I’ll write about it in a future article if there is sufficient interest.

2)      Google Answers

Google is Google is Google. Enough said!

3)      Yahoo Answers

Believe it or not, there was a time before Google and that time was ruled

by Yahoo.  You can’t really discount either Google or Yahoo, if you want to have any success online.

4)      Wiki Answers

Wiki Answers gives you user-generated content that is hard to ignore and you just might find something interesting and  inspiring.

5)      Answers

Answers are yet another flavor of Wiki Answers that gets your answers from its community and reference libraries.

6)      AnswerBag

AnswerBag will give you answers, tips and reviews from members of its community and provide the most popular topics for each day.

7)      MetaFilter

Here you will find a mixture of commentary and posts in a community-like environment.

8)      43Things

An online “how-to” guide to just about everything online and offline.

9)      AllExperts

The reputed oldest “Q & A” free service on the Internet.  You have volunteers answering your questions, how novel?

10)   FunAdvice

“Ask questions, get answers!”  Fair enough and really useful for reading how frequently the same questions are being asked.  Remember,  find a solution that can be met online or offline and well, you know?  FunAdvice is part “Q & A” website and social network.

11)    ENotes

ENotes is academic in nature with study guides, literature guides and lesson plans that will satisfy any educational endeavor and serve as a template for “how-to” articles for your site.

12)    BlogCatalog

BlogCatalog is a “Whose Who” of the blogosphere and social network all wrap into one.  Here you can search for any topic and you’re sure to find a blog that covers it.

13)  Alexa

Alexa is a website that is owned by Amazon.com and I have as much affection for it as I do Google Trends.  I think that you will come to like Alexa as much as I do, because you can see the worldwide ranking for websites and blogs, but equally as important, you can also look at the keywords that other websites are using to rank so well.

I know that this site is really not a pure, question and answer site, but I include it anyways because it is like a search engine for blogs and you can locate just about any blog in your area of interest and many of those blogs answer some of the questions that we all have from time to time and is worthy of inclusion.

14) Twazzup

Twazzup is a great site for searching one of the fastest growing websites     online, Twitter

15)   Yedda

Yedda offers a scrolling view of the most recent questions that may or may not have been answered.  You can also post your experiences as it relates to the questions people ask.

Ask a question, get relevant answers.  Got experience, why not answer a question?  Take time to explore the questions that others are asking and answering.

16)   Boardreader

Boardreader is a great search engine for searching forum topics.

17)    Boardtracker

Boardtracker is another forum search engine with a social media twist.

18)   Omgili

Omgili is an excellent place to discover what people are saying within forums.  Get opinions, consumer experiences, personal experiences, troubleshooting tips and recommendations.

19)  Asksutra

Asksutra will give you answers on a host of topics.  You can search various topics and get different perspectives from the members about the topics you’re interested in.

20)  Askville

Askville is an “Amazon intro”  into the world of questions and answering.  I expected to see “similar items” that you can purchase as it relates to what you’re searching for, but it’s purely questions and answers.

21)  Blogsearch

Blogsearch is a Google enterprise and like its title states, you can search blogs based on the keyword you put in the search box.

22)  IceRocket

IceRocket is a blog search engine that also allows you to search Twitter, MySpace, Images, The Web, news and “The Big Buzz,” which is IceRocket’s Most Linked To Videos, Movies and Top Posts.

23)  Technorati

It is difficult to have an article about the pulse of the Internet without including a couple of “pillar” sites like Technorati, Digg (24) and StumbleUpon (25).

Although they are included last, only because their popularity has pretty much made them a household name for many seasoned Internet Surfers.  From the very start, I wanted to introduce some sites that you may or may not be aware of and in future posts, I’ll include sites that you may not have heard of, but the increasing traffic to those new and upcoming sites, afford tremendous opportunities for growing your business.

One further comment about forums, which are an especially content-rich place to get your questions answered, so they make one of the best places to gauge what’s going on the Internet at any particular point in time.  To find something that you’re interested in learning more about, just put the “keyword” that you want to know more about in your favorite search engine box, with the word “forum” and you’re on your way to a wonderful adventure.  For example, if I wanted to know more about travel, I would put the phrase “travel forums,” with or without the quotation marks or both, just to record the search returns with each other.  Sometimes you’ll get some very interesting websites back that you wouldn’t have otherwise discovered.

Yep, as usual I include 25 Best Places to find the pulse of the Internet, but I also included sites within the same grouping such as blog search engines and forum search engines, because some sites are so similar, but offer one or two features that differentiates them, that it was tough to exclude them.  These 25 places online are by no means an exhaustive study or research of sites that you can visit to get a little more than a general gist of what’s happening on the Internet, but just enough that I hope that it gets you thinking about fresh places to get ideas about what people are asking for.

Anyone of the 25 sites listed will enable you to discover common concerns, challenges and problems that people are seeking a solution for.  Find a way to solve people’s problems and I say people’s problems, because most problems are common enough that they affect more than one person and that is the beginning of market demand.

If, there is enough market demand for people’s concerns, challenges and/or problems, then you have a market in which to fulfill.  That’s the perfect scenario, whereby you have demand online or offline that is not being fulfilled.  All you have to do is find out what that problem is and find an affiliate program to help you to fulfill it.  If, you can fulfill that demand without having to stock or ship a product or service, you could succeed online or offline, beyond your wildest dreams!

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