We are all out there trying to sell something. Whether it be in ‘real’ life or online, whether we are getting paid for it directly or not, we are all selling. We are selling a product or a service, our time, our writing, our unique skills, or maybe something less tangible. Maybe we are just trying to get more eyes on our blog.
If you hire a PR person to assist you in your sales and marketing efforts, one of the things they will tell you pretty quickly is that you have to monitor your industry, as well as your own brand, to see what is being written about you and your industry online, in blogs and even on Twitter (this post will not cover this, go here to search Twitter). It’s good advice. This post is for those of you wondering how to put this advice into practice. I am going to show you how I do it using free tools from Google.
There are lots of ways to do this, some more expensive fancier than others. I don’t want to argue which service is best, I want to focus on offering you a simple, easy to use solution. And for me, the solution is Google Reader. (If you are not familiar with Google Reader, drop everything and click on that link and take the tour.)
What I am suggesting you do is to create custom searches through Google search, and then subscribe to the rss feed of those results through Google Reader. Thus, if you set these up once, you don’t have to continually run the same searches over and over. As soon as news breaks about your topic, it will come into your Reader.
I can hear some of you saying that you already know all of this, but I am also saying, like most things, the beauty is in the details. Let’s take the TV show ‘Law and Order’ as an example. The first thing I want you to do is head over to Google News and type law and order in the search box. You will see that you get some results about the TV show, but other, unrelated results appear as well. This happens even if you use “law and order” (in quotes) as your search term. If you just set up your alert at this point, you would get lots of results that do not apply to what you are wanting to keep tabs on. So instead, click that advanced news search button up there. Now you will see lots of options to narrow down your search. So type Law and Order in the ‘with the exact phrase’ box, and then in the ‘with at least one of the words’ box, put tv.
You will see that you can also remove words from your search results, narrow the time frame of when articles were added to Google News, limit the publisher, the location, even where in the article your key words occur. With a little imagination, there are a lot of ways to refine your search. For now, go ahead and click the Google search button with just those parameters I suggested. You will now notice that the search has been refined, and there are only a couple of non-related articles. It’s not perfect, but it is much better than the first search was, and you will probably see even better results with your specific search terms. I was looking for something pretty broad as an example.
Now that we have refined our search, we need to create the alert for it. If you scroll to the bottom of the results page there are several options given to you to stay on top of this search you have just created. You can pick which ever of them sounds best to you, but for this post, and my purposes, subscribing to the news feed works the best. All you have to do is click that option, and you are taken to Google Reader, where all you have to do is click subscribe. You could customize this feed further within Google Reader by putting it in a folder, or renaming it, but basically you are now done. Whenever there is news on your query, it will flow right through to your new subscription in Google Reader. Pretty cool, but there is more.
The alert you just set up only catches the items caught by Google News. You can do the exact same process to search blogs. To do this, go to Google, then across the top on the left look for the link that says ‘more’. (it’s right after the Gmail link) Click that so the drop down list appears and select ‘blogs’, (here is the blog search page) then run through the exact same process. Go to advanced blog search, enter the search terms the same way, scroll down to the bottom of your results and subscribe to the blog search feed. This feed will now alert you anytime a blog article is posted with your search query in it somewhere.
If experienced users want to get technical, there is a way to do this all in one step. You can go back to the initial subscription options given to you after you ran the search the first time in Google News. The first option there, at the bottom of your search results, is to create an email alert. You can click on that, and then when presented with the options screen, select ‘comprehensive’ on the Type option, and then select ‘feed’ on the Deliver To option. This will create a feed for anytime your search term hits Google, whether it be blogs, news, video, groups or the web in general. (You would have to go to the ‘manage my alerts’ link and subscribe to your feed.) I found that this option was giving me too much noise, even when refined, and it was hard for me to tell news items from blog posts. I prefer having two feeds for each item I want to search on, one for blogs and one for news.
I am not saying any one way is correct, in fact a combination of many kinds of alerts is probably what you will end up with. I have been refining this process personally for a long time now. My point is that Google has many options under the hood, all free, and I wanted you to be aware of the tools out there so you can manipulate them to serve your purpose, and hopefully save some time and be more productive in the process.
As you can see, in addition to your brand, or your industry, you can set up these searches and feeds to keep tabs on pretty much anything you are interested in.
If you do this differently, let me know in the comments, I always love hearing new ideas. If there are any questions, I am always around.
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