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'm beginning to think I am either too dumb or too lazy to build a better blog!
the work load to do even some of what he ways to do begins to get overwhelming doesn't it?
Why do you say that?
Haven't written a post today so I won't put a shameless plug of my blog here.. haha.. I've been doing Google Alerts for a while now. Currently I do them for the following words:
Thrive Church, Tom Elmore, Scott Ayres, IQ Transport.
The reason I do Thrive church is because I run the social media for our church and want to see if anyone talks about us.http://www.thrivefacebook.info Although most of the alerts just pickup the word thrive and church separately. Hasn't been real useful. Tom is our pastor and I run his blog so I try to see if anyone is talking about him.http://www.tomelmore.com
IQ Transport is my business I run. It's been fairly helpful. I was able to respond to a good and bad review quickly through the alerts.http://www.iqtransport.com and obviously I watch my own name. Which until this blog challenge didn't come back with many results. But now it does! Kinda cool.
I used to keep up with words relating to car shipping, since that's what I do, but too many results came back and it was just annoying. Mainly was sending me alerts of competitors sites.
I use TweetDeck more than anything though to monitor keywords and etc. I follow words like "transportation", "car shipping", "freight" and etc. Through that I've been able to immediately respond to people tweeting that they need a car shipped and give them a live quote. Actualy gotten business that way..
I have keywords for my name, my site, my twitter, (which are all very close to being the same) and also Spiritual Formation, Christian Discipleship, Online Bible Study, Youth Conferences, Christian Music Festivals, Dunbar Youth Activities, and Teen Parenting. Some of these are new and others I have been reading long before I started blogging.
I think we will always have to sort through useless information, but it is worth reading 20 worthless articles to get one good, IMHO) For me it is more about listening to an extended dialogue.
This is new territory for me. I just set up the suggested keywords in Google Alerts in an RSS feed. I also set up a couple of keywords for news articles. Being a stay-at-home mom to young children often puts me in a bubble. I am typically the last to know of major world events–embarrassing.
Any tips on keywords for Christian/moral news articles???
Hmm… I don't have a ton of keyword ideas off the top of my head. I think it depends on which morality issues you want to monitor (abortion, marriage, etc.).
BUT… I have seen a site that lists lots of news that you might be looking for! It might give you some keyword ideas, or you can follow the RSS feeds that they already have set up! Check it out here… http://www.christianheadlines.com/
Just set up google alerts to monitor the words "community, my town (not giving town name here for safety), church." I'm also subscribed via rss to blogs that are sort of in my niche, and follow them on twitter. So a lot of my ideas and other things i've learned about blogging come from that too.
Blog posts for yesterday and today –
Your Community – School –http://tijuanabecky.wordpress.com/2010/05/14/your…
Your Community – Neighborhood and Town Events –http://tijuanabecky.wordpress.com/2010/05/14/your…
I finally have my post up for the day. Let me know what you think? http://larrywestfall.com/do-you-feel-invisible/
I set up a google alert for a part of our "elevator pitch". I have gotten pretty good articles and blogs from it.
Speaking Grace Online – Church on Your Time
I put in "church on your time". Good results so far.
I just reread the rules for this series. I'm supposed to leave a comment here everyday so everyone will know I'm still participating. Oops. I do link to the intro post everyday, so I'm hoping the pingback/trackback counts as a comment. I also send Paul bossy email. Those should count double. This is turning into a ramble, which is kind of what happens to my comments at the end of a very long week. Happy Friday!
That was really simple! Thanks for including the link to the Google Alert for blogs. I am all set up now and just waiting for some info to be picked up by my alerts!
Can we get really practical for a moment?
For those of you who have been receiving alerts for a while or are getting some good results today, can you speak to the specific benefits you experienced from a specific alert you received? Some possible examples…
– I received an alert about X article in which I learned about Y, which I otherwise would never have known about.
– I received an alert about X blog post where someone wrote about my organization. I went to the blog and posted a comment thanking them.
– I received an alert about X selling bootleg copies of my latest CD. I reported them to the FBI & their doing 5 years in federal prison. 😉
I think everyone would benefit from hearing each others' specific stories.
Under my "Teen Parenting" key word I received an update from the Parenting Today's Teens radio broadcast which turned me onto Mark Gregston at Heartlight Ministrieshttp://www.heartlightministries.org/blogs/markgre… As a youth pastor his blog has been a valuable blog to read on a regular basis as it is relevant to what I do every day.