Right now, as you are reading this, there is a blog being born.

There is a community about Fly Fishing with five hundred users and a “Work from Home Daddy” Blog Network with over forty-seven active blogs that have thousands and thousands of unique viewers.  Say you run an online ‘Bait and Tackle’ company, wouldn’t this be very valuable information?

Here are 5 easy steps that will help you learn where and how to start finding these magic portals of consumer engagement and information.

1. Search questions, not terms – this is the easy part.

If you haven’t already, search all of the brand terms and sayings that are a part of your business and trade.  You might be surprised what you find when you search for a question instead of a product name.  By searching for “How To’s…” and action terms like; “Fishing in the summer” you will find a plethora of blogs and networks of people actively discussing your niche.

2. Social Network Searches – Analyze the competition and what your audience might be doing online.

 

Search your chosen terms and questions on Search.Twitter.com and http://www.facebook.com/search/ .

 

You are now able to search Facebook users status updates.  This will help you to pinpoint who is an active audience and who you might want to target.   Take some time and research the audience.  What other networks are they a part of?  How do they prefer to communicate?  This will help you when you decide what Social platform to participate the most in.

3. Blogsearch – http://blogsearch.google.com/

By Searching Google’s Blog search engine you will be able to find sites that are hooked up to an  RSS feed that match your query.  You can set date range, specific searches and can omit spam blogs identified by Google.

4. Alltop – Alltop is a current list of Blogs/Networks/ Websites that are respected and popular.

All lists are broken down by category.  This reference point makes it easy to find any possible types of blogs there are…. Even Fishing Blogs! New features of Alltop allow the user to login and make favorite searches and recommendations.

5. Social Search – Joongel.com

Using a Social Media search engine such as Joongel.com will pinpoint sites that are community based and social.  The site is broken down searches based on the type of social site you are  looking for; shopping sites, blogs, social voting and bookmarking sites, gossip sites, questions  and answer sites, and more.  It comes with a Web Browser Toolbar and is extremely helpful.

While searching these sites, create your list of sites, networks, blogs, and communities.  After you have finished all 5 Steps, you will walk away with a few, if not hundreds of sites that pertain to your business.  Hopefully this will expand your horizons and open up communities that your brand will be benefit from in multiple ways.

What are some simple ways that you identify your targets online?

By the way, you can follow the 10e20 Twitter account here.