If you are a business of any type and if you are blogging, you have to watch and monitor what is happening online. Especially about you, your business, your brand and your niche.

Today is day 19 in our 31-Days to Kick Your Blog in the Butt and today we are going to talk about setting up alerts and automatic searches to monitor what is going on.

Today’s lesson

Why you need to be aware of what others are talking about

There are a number of reasons why you should keep track of what people might be saying about you, your business or your chosen niche.

1. Vanity and reputation reasons – there are specific things you should be watching for so you can keep track of positive as well as negative things online. You should be keeping track of your name, company name, brand names, blog name and even your domains.

2. Niche specific alerts – no matter what niche you are in, you will want to keep track of what is being said. What you want to do is determine what words fit best with your niche which are used online for searches and conversations. Keep track of them.

3. Breaking news in your niche – You need to remain fully informed on what is going on in your particular niche. You also need to know what is happening in your particular area of business too. By setting up these types of alerts you will be better informed. If you use this information to keep your target audience better informed, you go even further in establishing yourself as a reliable source of information. And an authority too.

4. Ideas for blog post- Because you can set these alerts up to monitor other blogs based on keywords, even if you don’t subscribe to them, you will have yourself a ready supply of post ideas. And, since these alerts will be set up specific to your niche and/or market, you can use what you get in numbers 2 and 3 above for new blog post. Become your target audiences’ main source of information.

5. Build and expand your network of influence – Using these types of alert tools will enable you to know who is talking about these things each and every day. Seek them out and build a relationship with them. Expand your own sphere of influence with other thought leaders and opinion shapers in your particular niche.

Tools of the trade

Here is a small list of the tools you can use to monitor what is going on in your niche, market, industry and about you online. These are the three biggies I use daily.

• Google Alerts – Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results based on your choice of query or topic.
• Twitter Alerts – I use a lot of tools to keep up on what is being said about a particular topic on twitter. Some of my favorites are simply twitter search and tweetbeep. Tweetbeep works very similar to Google alerts. You can set it up to watch particular search terms and send you email alerts when there is a hit. Twitter search on the other hand works just like a regular Google search. Type in a search term and see the results. What is great about twitter search is the fact most of the twitter desktop clients have this built in and you can set up a column to watch for search terms. I currently have 3 such columns set up in my twitter client following certain search terms.
• Technorati Watchlist – I don’t use this tool as much as the other two, but it is handy for watching to see what blogs are saying on a particular search term. Technorati Watchlist is easy to setup and use. And you can subscribe to the alerts via RSS if you want.
• Social Mention – Socialmention is Google Alerts for twitter. With socialmention you can Receive free daily email alerts of your brand, company, CEO, marketing campaign, or on a developing news story, a competitor.

Your homework

I would like you to take one of the suggested tools and set up some alerts. If I had to pick one to start with, it would be Google Alerts. Also, don’t over do it. I have mine set up to give me one alert a day and I check those first thing in the morning during my normal morning “blogging routine”.