The speed at which businesses change has been picking up over the last decade. Today, entire industries can change over the span of just months. If you’re not keeping an eye on the pulse of emerging business trends, you and your business will get left behind.
Here are three ways you can you use the internet to keep track of emerging business trends right from your computer:
1. Read the Wall Street Journal or The Economist online
The Wall Street Journal is considered by many business experts to be the premier business newspaper. They follow business activities across a wide variety of industries and report on them every day. The Economist is another widely recognized magazine. One big difference between the Journal and The Economist is that the Journal is a daily newspaper, while The Economist is published weekly.
If you’d rather keep your eye firmly on the pulse of business, then follow the Journal for daily updates. On the other hand, if you just want to know the most important things that are going on every week, then consider following The Economist. Rather than following the print version, you can follow the Journal or The Economist with the iPhone app or the online versions. Using the iPhone or the internet to browse makes it a lot easier to scan through and just read the articles you really want to read.
2. Follow Relevant Topics Using YourVersion
Each industry is different. You may not care much about emerging business trends in the consumer goods industry, but you may care a lot about emerging trends in the cleantech industry. One great way is follow a specific industry online is to use a news aggregator like YourVersion. These services will collect news articles based on keywords you submit and give you all the result in one easy to use interface.
For example, if you are interested in cleantech, you might type in keywords like Solar, Clean Energy, Clean Tech, Hybrid, etc. It will then show you all news articles related to your industry condensed into one screen.
3. Follow the RSS of Top Blogs
RSS or “Really Simple Syndication” allows you to follow blog posts from your favorite blogs as they’re posted. Rather than having to visit each blog individually, you can just subscribe to their RSS feed.
To do so, you’ll need to download an RSS feed reader. There are many free options for RSS readers. Once you have a reader, you can start subscribing to feeds. You’ll then see all the new posts stream by and be able to pick and choose which ones you want to read.
These are three ways to follow emerging business trends online. Use one, two or all three depending on how much information you want.
