As ubiquitous as the internet is, you can’t be across all things at all times in your niche.
It’s important to have a general idea of what the trends are not only for your sake so you can stay current, but also so you can share that information with your readers (perhaps in your next link post? Or social media update?)
The easiest way you can stay abreast of what’s been going on is to set up alerts and subsriptions.
Today’s episode of the ProBlogger Podcast will take you through how you can create a steady flow of great input to fill your inspiration cup and to stay on top of current issues. We expand on the initial “set up an alert” challenge in the original 31DBBB workbook and I’ll outline the reasons I think you need to set up alerts, and how it will help you create better content for your readers.
We’ll go through both Google and Twitter alerts and some other things to consider setting up for blog posts relevant to you.
Head on over to the podcast for the links I mention to help you set up the alerts, which will be in the show notes.
Good luck!
Click here to listen to day 10 of the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog series on the ProBlogger Podcast.
Further Reading:
- Google: Google Alerts – Monitor the Web for Interesting Content
- This Little Service Absolutely Crushes Google Alerts – Forbes.com
- Tap into Trending Content Before Your Competitors – Buzzsumo
- How to Use RSS feeds – Digital Trends
- How to Set Up Content Alerts – Buzzsumo
Alerts can be a great way to also find out when your favorite online merchants are having a fashion sale.
Great podcast to get started and for brand names and eventually very longtailish words that’s good enough too. Any insight about more advanced but free tools (which would for instance support things like boolean querries).
I’m working on an Evernote Addon to do spaced repetition with the notes.
Evernote is too broad, horrible signal to noise ratio
“spaced repetition”
What would be really interesting would be something like Evernote AND Mess + Evernote AND studying etc
there are bunch of paid tools which do that, aware of any good free ones? (covering blogs is the key but covering social media would be great)
Thanks for the tip. Somehow I landed on a Video Tutorial for creating Google Alerts to be read in Feedly. I’ve wanted to do this for some time. Hooray! I can now. (http://www.spiderworking.com/blog/2014/02/18/curate-content-feedly-google-alerts/)
Anyway, I wanted to thank you for this podcast. I had success. Through the alert search, I discovered that I was a favorite blog for two individuals and they are sharing links to my blog from theirs. I did what you said earlier (send an email) to a reader. Things are looking up.
Thank you so much for this wonderful podcast series. I’m learning a lot, even if I’m lagging behind.
Marvelous post. worth reading and a good tool for the newbies to know subscribing the alerts to stay in touch with current updates. Best handy when one don’t have time to surf all sites online and meanwhile wants the required updates through alerts.
gr8 info