The Positives and the Perils of Monitoring Your Brand on the Internet

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The Importance of Monitoring Your Brand

As we continue along on our journey to building a successful blog, we've learned a lot along the way. In past episodes we talked about things like developing our content strategy, tracking the source of our traffic, connecting with influencers, building an email list, promoting our content through social media and we even discussed how to use images and post titles to be more memorable and make a deeper connection with our readers. 

Now you're at the point in your blog's growth were you need to be mindful and pay attention to what others are saying about you. You need to know who and when people are linking to your content. Find out who your fans and supporters are. On the other hand, it's important to know when and if something negative is being said about you so that you can react and respond quickly.  

What Tracking Tools Can I Use

Whenever people talk about brand monitoring they will always recommend using Google Alerts. It's easy to sign up for Google Alerts, just enter your email address, and your name or keywords that you want to monitor and you'll start getting email notifications when Google detects the link or the mention. The problem with this is that Google Alerts aren't as accurate as they used to be. There is a ton of stuff getting past the radar and you'll find out when you sign up for this next service I'm going to recommend. 

TalkWalker Alerts

I'm getting a whole lot more notifications from TalkWalker Alerts these days than I get from Google Alerts. Here are a few examples:

+Ana Hoffman from Traffic Generation Cafe linked to my blog in a post about on page SEO.

+Daniel Tan issued a News Release about SEOPressor and mentioned my popular tutorial on the topic

Fellow named blogger Karmarka mentioned me in a comment on +Lisa Irby's blog!

Then there is also a down side to monitoring your brand. By that I'm referring to the time when you find something that doesn't exactly make you smile - like people scraping your content! This one is coming directly from my RSS feed. I can tell because it starts off with "New on Basic Blog Tips:" which is the phrase I added to FeedBurner...

Be sure to sign up for TalkWalker Alerts in addition to Google Alerts.

Google Analytics Trackbacks

Go to your Google Analytics reports (read this if you need help setting up Google Analytics) and under Traffic > Social > Trackbacks, take a look at these reports. Here's a screenshot from mine where I found two pleasant surprises from +Sharon Hurley Hall and +Timo Kiander 

Click to enlarge image

What other tools are you using to keep track of people mentioning your brand and your keywords? Let me know in the comments. 

Please stop by iTunes and give the podcast a review and rating or subscribe on Stitcher and I'll speak to you soon! 

Mentioned in this episode:

• Shout out to +Justin Germino from DragonBlogger
• CommentLuv
• Crazy Egg Blog
• Pick the Brain Blog
• Basic Blog Tips on Scoop.it or YouTube Tips and Tutorials
• Podcaster's Daily on Paper.li