How To Use Google Wonder Wheel to Find Hot Story Ideas

Do you know what Google’s Wonder Wheel is? It’s a really useful visual tool for finding popular search terms that are related to an initial search term that you provide.

Bloggers use the Wonder Wheel to find new blog post ideas. You can use the Wheel in a very similar way to find ideas for hot stories.

1) Use Google Hot Trends or Twitter to find a hot topic of the moment that interests you. Let’s say, for example, that “British Election 2010″ is a hot term on Google Hot Trends today, and you’re interested in that one. Go to Google search and search on “British Election 2010.”

2) In your Google Search results page, just above where the results begin, you will see “Web + Show Options…”  Click on the “+” sign. It will reveal a long text-link list of options. The next-to-the-last category of options is titled “> Standard View”. Under “> Standard View” you’ll see “Wonder Wheel” as the second choice.

3) You’ll be presented with a visual showing you related terms that people are searching on at Google. So for “British Election 2010″ we get “english elections 2010,” “national elections 2010,” “uk election candidates,” etc.

4) If you click on “uk election candidates,” you’ll be presented with an expanded graphic showing search terms related to “uk election candidates” that people have entered into Google search. One of the related terms is “election results Scotland.” You may decide that this is worth looking into. How do the elections in Scotland impact the rest of the UK or maybe even the world? Or did something particularly interesting happen during the Scotland elections such as accusations of fraud or…?

You get the idea. It’s that simple and that powerful.

You can use the Wonder Wheel to quickly find hot topics to write about, and you can also use those search terms to build strong story titles that will help you get your share of the traffic. You should use the exact search term in your story title and also early (very early) in the actual copy of your story. This will optimize your story for search engine results and maximize your chances of appearing on page 1 of Google’s search results for that term.