Finding Great Content: try Alltop

Alltop - all the top stories

Looking for content

How do you find great content to tweet about or share on Facebook or LinkedIn or some other social network, or inspire a blog post you can be proud of?

If you are challenged by that, you are not alone.  Just now I searched on Google for the term <finding great content> and there were about 581 million responses.

Alltop to the rescue

One source of content that has been around for several years but which I don’t see being mentioned a lot when the subject of finding content comes up, is Alltop.

So what’s Alltop?

If I had to come up with one phrase to answer the What’s Alltop? question, it would be something like “an aggregator of current content”.

Alltop uses more words and tells us more:

The purpose of Alltop is to help you answer the question, “What’s happening?” in “all the topics” that interest you. You may wonder how Alltop is different from a search engine. A search engine is good to answer a question like, “How many people live in China?” However, it has a much harder time answering the question, “What’s happening in China?” That’s the kind of question that we answer.

There is a potentially bewildering number of topics covered, from ABC News, About.com, Accounting and Acne, to Youth Sport, YouTube, Zombies and  Zoology.

Alltop Des Walsh segmentUnder each category is an array of web publications, each with the subject titles of its up to five most recent posts.

When you mouse over one of the post titles, you see a popup screen with an excerpt of the post, so you can scan that quickly and decide whether you want to click through to the origin site and read the whole post.

You can make your own Alltop page

One of the best features of Alltop is that you can design your own Alltop page, which delivers automatically the latest posts from the sites in which you are most interested and which you have personally chosen.

And if a site doesn’t deliver useful content for you, it is a simple matter to delete it from your page and either stick with what you’ve got or add one or more new sites.

Your Alltop page has its own web address (URL) in a simple format, incorporating your user name. My Alltop url for instance (see image below) is http://my.alltop.com/deswalsh

My Alltop Page for Des Walsh

Your own site on Alltop?

Alltop - seriously, I got in?I don’t know how easy or how difficult it is to get your site accepted for Alltop listing. I’ve always thought it a special gift when this site of mine was included under the Social Media category, along with some luminaries of the social media world. I got in early!

On its About page, under FAQ for Site Owners and Bloggers, Alltop invites you to submit your site for consideration:

Q. How do I get my site or blog added to Alltop?

A. Use our submission form to provide us with information about your site or blog, and we’ll see what we can do.

Note: to access and use the submission form you need to login, or create an Alltop account and then log in.

Love the badges

The site offers an array of badges, some with humorous messages. Alltop’s clear favorite is the message Confirmation that I/we kick ass.

Alltop - confirmation that I kick assI remember when I was first admitted into the Alltop site I said I wasn’t sure if I should use that one. “Why not?” came the answer.

Why not, indeed!

Try Alltop and let us know how you go

I hope you’ll try Alltop. And if you have a site you would like to see there, put in a submission. Who knows, you could be tapping into a much bigger audience than you have.

You’ll find under various categories that there are some of the top sites included. Then make your own page to make it easy for you to find content you can happily share, or use as inspiration of some new content of your own.

And please bookmark this post and come back and let us know how Alltop has helped you in the search for great content.

Des Walsh

Business coach and digital entrepreneur. With coach training from Coachville.com and its Graduate School of Coaching, and a founding member of the International Association of Coaching, Des has been coaching business owners and entrepreneurs for the past 20 years. Over the same period he has also been actively engaged in promoting the business opportunities of the digital economy. He is a certified Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) coach, and a certified specialist in social media strategy and affiliate marketing.

Similar Posts

2 Comments

  1. Des,

    Much like you, I got in on Alltop early, and I’ve enjoyed it. I think it is one of those little known social secrets and I love that you’ve shared it here. It’s been so long since I’ve checked in on my listing that I think it might be time for a review!

    Also, thanks for swinging by my site and adding your thoughts to my recent post. Much appreciated.

    – Trish

Comments are closed.