This is Day 9 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, a group project 60+ of us bloggers are doing together in an effort to help each other become better bloggers. You can read an overview here.
The purpose of today’s lesson is to help you as a blogger stay informed about what is being written about you and your niche. Every day massive numbers of news articles, blog posts, and tweets are written. Sorting through all of it to find what is relevant and helpful to you can be a daunting task. Fortunately, there are tools that can simplify and speed up this task.
Why Monitor?
Before we get to how to monitor what’s happening in your niche, let’s talk about why.
- Stay informed about what’s happening in your niche. The best bloggers know what’s happening in their field.
- Be among the first to blog about news. When something happens people are much more likely to read the first or second blog post written about it that day than the 100th post written about it a week later.
- Networking. When someone writes about your niche and you know about it, it gives you the opportunity to get to know them and perhaps comment on their article or follow them on twitter.
- Manage your reputation. When someone writes or tweets about you, your organization, or your blog – good or bad – you want to know about it so you have the opportunity to respond.
Keywords to monitor
The first step in setting up alerts is to determine what keywords/phrases you want to monitor. Some options include:
- Your name
- Your organization
- The name of your blog
- The domain names of any websites you or your organization have, including your blog.
- Keyword related to your niche.
This can be challenging. If your name is John Smith or you work for First Baptist Church, you might as well forget about monitoring your name or organization. Even selecting keywords that are relevant but not too broad can be challenging. Monitoring “Bible study,” “parenting,” or “web design” is likely to result in an overwhelming deluge of alerts.
There’s some guess work and trial and error that goes into selecting the right keywords to monitor. It’s also a good idea to periodically review the keywords you’re monitoring and consider adding and removing keywords.
Tools for monitoring
Once you know what keywords you’re going to monitor, the next step is to set up notification services.
One of the challenges with this task is that old tools get discontinued and new tools come on line all the time. For example, in the 31 Days e-book it recommends using Technorati.com watchlists. However, Technorati discontinued watchlists almost a year ago, and they also no longer supply blog search results to an RSS feed.
At the moment, there are essentially three types of items to monitor. These are the tools I use to monitor them:
- News articles – Google Alerts (for type, select news)
- Blog posts – Google Alerts (for type, select blog)
- Twitter tweets – Twitter search
You can set up Google alerts to email you any time it finds a news or blog article with your keywords in it, but receiving email alerts throughout the day can be very distracting. In my opinion, you are much better off subscribing to the RSS feed for each alert using Google Reader, and then checking them once or twice a day.
Discussion
- What keywords are you monitoring?
- Can you give an example of a useful alert you received? How did you respond? How did it benefit your blog?
- Are there any tools other than Google Alerts & Twitter Search that you use or recommend?
- What questions do you have about alerts & setting them up?
The Extra Mile
A few other things you can do to take your blog, other bloggers, and this project even further today…
- Reply & give other bloggers feedback on the little things they do.
- When other bloggers include a link to a new article they’ve posted today, click, read, and comment on it.
- Check previous posts in the series for new comments.
- Tweet, share, & bookmark this post.
49 Comments
I am monitoring my name, my twitter handle, my blog name, my blog URL, and the keywords "faith", "family", and "homeschooling" for now. I set up Google alerts two days ago in anticipation of this lesson and am still trying to figure out how to tweak my alerts to be of the most benefit. I was surprised by how easy it is to set up Google alerts and make changes to them as needed.
I'm spending time with family this weekend and won't be online much. I will respond to any replies here, e-mails, and moderate comments on my blog on Monday. Have a blessed weekend!
Oh, and my post today was part 3 of "My Second Chance" the story of how I survived divorce and met my husband.http://jenniferjanes.wordpress.com/2010/05/14/my-…
Jennifer, those are very general keywords. How many alerts are you getting each day? What percentage of them are you finding useful?
This is my problem – trying to narrow down what I use as keywords or make them more useful.
I'm having trouble narrowing it down, so that's what I'm using for now to see what I come up with in the alerts. I'm getting some good blogs that mean I can do more networking and see what other people are writing.
Such a great idea, the cliff-hanger post. I'll have to try to do a multiple part story. Yours kept me coming back.
Thanks, Richard! That was my first "series." I wasn't exactly sure how to do it. I tried to keep the posts fairly short, and it worked out this time that a cliffhanger occurred right about 400 words or so! 🙂
Let me know when you try a series. I'd love to read your story!
~Jennifer
I am working on setting up alerts. I am excited about this and how it may impact how I blog. My post is up for today. http://www.ronniespoon.blogspot.com/
Well…
I think my dog ate Darren Rowse's Google Alerts. (It does not count that I do not have a dog. : )
http://greeninventionscentral.blogspot.com/2010/0…
lol
I just got through setting up google alerts. Easy as pie. It even transferred my RSS feed from blogger so I could read it all in one place. We'll see in the next few days if it is useful to me. I put in:
1. My name (it's not all that common)
2. My blog name and url
3. My church name and url
4. a couple topics that relate
Today's post is Meek, not Weak:http://junctionforjesus.blogspot.com/2010/05/meek…
Richard, specifically what keywords related to your blog's niche did you set up alerts for?
Since I am doing a series on the beatitudes I used that as a keyword, along with discipleship, prayer, devotionals.
I found that if I put more than one word in the alert and tell it to look for all the words, it cuts down on some of the junk. Also I sent it to Google reader, not my e-mail so I could more easily manage it.
I set up about a dozen Google Alerts last night. Frankly after the work on niches and forums I didn't expect to get any results. I sure was wrong. In fact some results have even led to potential forums! Now I just need to check for value and see what I want lo continue receiving in alerts. I have not set up for my name, blog names, etc., yet. Listening To God has produced some great leads. I also have alerts for Quakers, the practice of stillness, personal transformation, modern prophets, among others. We'll see what I think after a few days!
Here's another one I'm having issues with. If the niche is broad in itself – say Christian inspiration, what kind of keywords do you use? Something like "Inspiration" or "faith" would bring back way too many results. I'm really interested to get started, I just don't know what to look for.
That's a tough question. It's exactly what I was talking about when I wrote, "Even selecting keywords that are relevant but not too broad can be challenging." Perhaps you can think of sub-categories that fall within Christian inspiration. Or perhaps you could look at the 3-5 most popular posts you've written and focus your alerts on the topics discussed in those posts.
I agree with Paul, this can be kinda tough. But I do think that there could be some keywords hidden within "Christian inspiration" that could be worth trying, depending on what you are shooting for. In fact, the search result my bring back non-religious stuff that may be worthy of monitoring and might open doors for evangelism.
I'd start by answering questions about why people need inspiration…
dealing with difficult times?
…which ones?
loss of a loved one?
anxiety?
depression?
job stress?
Make sense? I think just digging deeper into the who, what, why -type questions may lead further down the right path. And if you are watching for 'job stress' then you may find yourself talking with non-Christians about it and opening doors to talking about how faith helps deal with it.
I hope this helps! That was a great question!
It's good to learn some tricks of Google searches to set up alerts. I've had an alert to watch for anyone linking against my old URL, thus:
link:jonreid.blogs.com
But reading the exercise, I thought, "What if someone types that but doesn't turn it into a link? I'll miss it." So I changed it to simply
jonreid.blogs.com
This was too wide. My first result was for
jonreed.co.uk/blog/politics/welcome-to-grown-up-politics
So now I have enclosed the search in quotes, to say, "match exactly this:"
"jonreid.blogs.com"
My post today is one of my "out-of-context quotes" I put up from time to time: http://www.blogoneanother.com/2010/05/coworker-se…
OK, that's funny. My first alert for jonreid.blogs.com is… can you guess? Right here, ha ha!
I have been listening for a while now, ever since I heard the concept of 'Listening posts'. I think Chris Brogan also talks about them like this. As for actually doing something about them – hmmm, not enough.
Apart from the above ones I use: http://www.alertrank.com/ http://www.ubervu.com/
I even thinkhttp://www.postrank.com/ is an interesting was of monitoring you engagement between the different social networks
and I had setup watches on 'filmmaking' and 'synapticlight'
I have found that using Google Alerts can be a little tricky because of my topic: running. It's a term that gets used a lot of different areas, so I have had to get more specific in my search terms.
Yeah, you might have to try keywords like "jogging," "running training," "marathon training"
I've used Google alerts for several years for gathering helpful information about my job, my church, my Sr. Pastor, etc. Besides the obvious searches for my blog name, personal name, etc, I haven't used this tool for my blogging like I could. This will be a good exercise for me to press into.
One funny site I found a couple of months ago is called the Dirtch Reputation Monitor. You can find out what people are saying about you (or other people with your name) here. I guess it would be helpful to a politician; I just found it humorous:http://dirtch.com/index.aspx
My blog post today should get some interesting responses: When a Pastor Decides to Leave their Churchhttp://bit.ly/b5SJ2h
Man.. no one was talking about me on that site.. shucks!
No results for me either. Does that mean everyone likes me cause no one says bad things about me? Or does it just mean I'm a nobody?