If you operate a blog you always compete against other blogs in your niche. It can be a nice competition where everyone is citing the other blog if the story appeared there first or it can be a niche where no one is linking to blogs of the same niche.

It’s always nice to be the first to write about a certain topic because that gives you a head start in the race for the best search engine position and makes it more likely that other blogs and websites link to your story when writing about the topic.

I would like to share one of my secrets on how you can be the first, or among the first. In theory every cool site, article or tool makes it sooner or later on bookmarking websites like Delicious. When you look at the Delicious user base you notice that some users tend to be the first to discover great stuff, those are the ones that are the first to bookmark.

Delicious offers user based RSS feeds. So, all you need to do is connect the pieces of this puzzle and locate users who are publishing news items of your niche before the others. Subscribe to those user feeds and you will be in for a head start, more often than not.