just some ideas:
if you need more control, you could try and use a custom field (in the example the key is ‘hot_text’), where you enter the text that you want to show.
<a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="<?php printf( esc_attr__( 'Permalink to %s', 'twentyten' ), the_title_attribute( 'echo=0' ) ); ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php the_title(); ?></a>
<?php $hot = get_post_meta($post->ID,'hot_text',true); if($hot) { echo '<span class="css-'.$hot.'"> ('.$hot.') </span>'; } ?>
style for instance with span.css-raw { color: #123456; }
a different approach:
using tags (taxonomy) and a bit of code to show only certain tags in certain colors.
the following snippet would show all tags of the post, each within brackets and with a unique css class for the span they are contained in. if you would only have one tag per post, it will show this.
<a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="<?php printf( esc_attr__( 'Permalink to %s', 'twentyten' ), the_title_attribute( 'echo=0' ) ); ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php the_title(); ?></a>
<?php $post_tags = wp_get_post_tags($post->ID); foreach($post_tags as $pt) { echo '<span class="tagged-'.$pt->name.'"> ('.$pt->name.') </span>'; } ?>
style for instance with span.tagged-raw { color: #123456; }
you could build on this idea and include a filter to filter out other tags that you don’t want to show.