31dbbb Day 10: Set up Alerts to Monitor Your Blogs Niche

Overview of Day 10 Tasks

Day 10 is here — we’re 1/3 of the way through the chal­lenge already.  Today’s topic is another one hav­ing to do with your niche.  Many of you already fig­ured out what your niche was dur­ing Day 4’s Task: Ana­lyze a Top Blog in Your Niche.  If not, here’s a sec­ond chance to try and fig­ure it out!

Key Con­cepts:

• In addi­tion to writ­ing actual blog posts; watch­ing, mon­i­tor­ing, read­ing and lis­ten­ing to what oth­ers are say­ing are impor­tant activities.
• Rea­sons to be aware of what oth­ers are talk­ing about in your niche include get­ting ideas for new posts, being aware of break­ing news, pro­file build­ing, net­work­ing, and man­ag­ing your reputation.
• You can set up alerts through dif­fer­ent sources includ­ing Twit­ter Alerts and Google News and Blog Alerts.
• Types of alerts to set up include words rel­e­vant to your blog’s niche or your indus­try ie “wed­ding dress” if you blog about wed­dings and ‘van­ity alerts’, which are key­words like your name, blog name, or com­pany name.

Ques­tions:

1. Have you ever used alerts for your blog or oth­er­wise?  How was it useful?
2. What key­words did you use to set up alerts for today’s task?

Day 10 Task on Dar­ren Rowse Blog site

• 2010 July Retrieved from Problogger.net Day 10 Forum Posts Day 10

Ok, I am very behind. Started late. Skip­ping some days and will go back because the rich part of this assign­ment is doing it with oth­ers and that means jump­ing ahead and later going back.

Before today, I have never setup alerts, it just seemed like more dis­trac­tions for read­ing. Now I can see it is impor­tant to use t see how your name or blog name is being pre­sented on the Web. Today is the first day of alerts using Google Alerts, I pick an email address sep­a­rate from my main address so it all goes to one place and doesn’t fill up my mail box. When you set it up for your blog, make sure it is the whole url so it knows exactly where and what to look for.

Tak­ing action by set­ting up Google alerts and keywords:

I needed to use the advanced search on blogs to find my blog and oth­ers with sim­i­lar names in their title. Search on twit­ter With­out the advanced search, I don’t exist, yet. At least my url is not out with­out advanced search.

I added my name both with a space and with­out. There are oth­ers in the world named with my name so I will get those too but it is not so ubiq­ui­tous that it will be overwhelming.

Q2 Picked a key word for each of two blogs. “Social Media” for http://socialmedia.eileenteaches.com/blog/ and “travel blog­gers” for the one being setup this week before Aug 1 so I can reg­is­ter for The Travel Blog­gers Show Cur­rently, I am fol­low­ing them on twit­ter. The fol­low­ing are the key­words I am try­ing. Not sure if I need the url to get hits so I am try­ing this both ways to see how it shows up.

Key­words: http://socialmedia.eileenteaches.com/blog/ eileen lud­wig eileen­lud­wig eileenludwig.com/blog social media socialmeida.eileenteaches.com/blog travel blog­gers http://www.eileenludwig.com/blog/ inblogti­tle: Social Media School

Com­peti­tors or Pro­fes­sional Contacts?

Found some com­pe­ti­tion too using the advanced search with same title of blog and sim­i­lar ideas on url’s from other coun­tries. These might be help­ful when I return to do Day 4. Decided to add the url’s for the some spe­cific com­pe­ti­tion as key­word search and will mon­i­tor if that is use­ful as well as the key­words listed above

• http://socialmediaschool.com.au/ A phys­i­cal school in Australia
• http://socialmediaschool.ca/ May be inactive
• http://socialmediaschool.posterous.com/ New Zealand moved to Social Media NZ and smnz.co.nz
• http://socialwebschool.com/ moved to http://humancapitalleague.com/socialwebv
• http://www.bloggersschool.com/
• http://www.edsocialmedia.com/

Just look­ing at the few imme­di­ate emails from the alert set­tings, this is going to inter­est­ing to mon­i­tor. Set up RSS feeds to Google Reader just by click­ing some screens after the RSS sym­bol which cor­re­lates to the same gmail address.

Orga­ni­za­tion of information:

I have not used Hoot­Suite or Tweet­Deck or Net­worked Blogs but want to look at them. When I see peo­ple post­ing from those appli­ca­tions, I know they are no longer com­mu­ni­cat­ing with each per­son but just putting out con­tent. Is it good or bad? I am less likely to com­ment on their post because I know they are absent. Isn’t that like talk­ing to some­one on the phone while they are doing some­thing else? Or being at lunch and the other per­son is on the phone? Or the table next to yours the per­son is on the phone and speak­ing loudly and ruin­ing the atmos­phere of lunch out? Some com­pa­nies post a blog post and go away and hours later post another but their is no com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Are we defeat­ing the intent of social media when we use all these tools to fil­ter mes­sages? Or do we need to fil­ter against mar­ke­teers? These are other areas to inves­ti­gate but this one hour assign­ment has taken me far and wide and has been three hours.

Mon­i­tor­ing your brand, keep­ing up with the lat­est trends requires some way of get­ting the infor­ma­tion. Google Alerts is one way. Here is Greg Pincus’s tuto­r­ial on why and how of Google Alerts in two parts

• Why Alerts
• How to setup Alerts

Man­ag­ing RSS feeds and how to use it and set it up by Lynda Gid­dens. Based on Lynda’s expla­na­tions, I installed the book­marklet in my tool­bars area of my browser. Not sure about cat­e­gories yet. Or feel Con­fused. Will reread when I have more content..

Orga­nize sources into mag­a­zine like start page with a plug in avail­able from fire­fox called Feedly Just installed. Have to restart fire­fox but I have three or four win­dows open with at least 10 tabs in each. Oh well, fire­fox prob­a­bly needs a refresh or it will crash.