Everyone keeps talking about information overload. I feel it myself every single day I spend online.
It becomes even more difficult when all you really want is to monitor your niche, but all the searches are bringing too much info while at the same time, you can hardly use any of it.
Here are a few quick ways you can use to subscribe to updates in your niche, that don’t include setting up Google Alerts or using Google+ Sparks.
The ways I will show you will require a RSS reader. I use Google Reader for this.
Not sure how other readers let you organize the info but what I did with the links I added is put them all in a folder and name the folder “Monitoring of [keyword]“. That way, if I am monitoring multiple keywords for the same site, or multiple keywords for multiple sites, I can still keep them organized.
As an example I will take “fashion over 40″ for the keywords we will monitor.
Youtube Videos Monitoring
You may want to stay updated with all the Youtube videos using your keyword.
To do that, you would add this RSS to your Reader:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/videos?q=%22fashion%20over%2040%22&orderby=published&alt=rss&client=ytapi-youtube-search&v=2
This link is a RSS feed for all Youtube videos that contain the keyword you want to track. It will pull up videos using “fashion over 40″ tag, or having it in description or the title.
Since you want to use this link to track your own keywords, just replace the bolded/underlined part with your keywords. If you have a space in your keywords (tracking more than a single word) you will replace the space with %20. This goes for all the links I will post below (so I don’t have to copy/paste this paragraph).
Why monitor Youtube Videos like this?
There are many reasons and here are a few off the top of my head:
- Learning about the news in your industry as soon as they are on Youtube.
- Getting post or video ideas – if you see a video from a competitor and they missed an important thing while talking about your topic, you can create a whole new video or write a post focusing on explaining that one missed detail.
- Doing video responses – sometimes this strategy is better than leaving a comment on a video. Making a good response to a video can bring you crazy amounts of traffic.
- You will be the first to leave a comment/make a video response/cover the topic with missing details.
Flickr Images updates
Why would you want to get image updates from Flickr? Well, not everyone will, but if you are in a niche that can be related to images (and most are) this can be very useful.
Flickr can actually be a major traffic source (see link in the next paragraph). The link to add to your Reader is this one:
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=%22fashion%20over%2040%22&format=rss_200
Why should you get Flickr updates?
If you have a blog about fashion, like in this example, and someone posts an image and tags it with your keywords, you might want to use that image on your blog and actually build a link to the post, from the image. For the whole strategy on the link building with Flickr,read this guest post of mine, it explains it in details.
Don’t limit yourself if you think Flickr images are not a good fit for your blog. Besides food, fashion, pets and fitness, even images of money (make money online blogs), happy people (self improvement blogs) and friendly greetings (social media blogs) will work.
Forum Keyword Tracking
This one can be overwhelming depending on which keywords are you trying to keep up with. So try not to set your keywords as too general.
To track this one, you will actually use the RSS created from the Board Reader search:
http://boardreader.com/rss/fashion%20over%2040.html?s=time_desc&p=20&format=RSS2.0
Aren’t Forums dead?
They most definitely are not. And sometimes, depending on the niche you are in, they might be your best link building and traffic generation source.
Besides using the link above to stay updated with new posts on the topic of your choice, I see another advantage here.
It actually helped me find Forums I should post on. I could see which forums are very targeted for my keywords and I could see which ones are actually active.
Google Blog Search
This is something you would do if you wanted to find blogs in your niche using Google search. But this way, instead of doing searches all the time, you can just subscribe to the feed that will keep you informed of all the new updates. Note, I see static websites included in this search, so I can guess that Google is pulling the results from the RSS feeds of multiple blogs and static websites.
The link to use is:
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&q=%22fashion%20over%2040%22&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss
Why keep track of blogs and websites?
Well, new post ideas are always welcome, right? How about blog commenting opportunities? Or maybe running into a blog that is complimentary to your blog but not directly competing with you? That is a great way to find people you can work with to promote each other’s businesses.
News Updates
You can also use Google News to stay up to date, and this is more important in some industries than others, but I thought it would be good to include the link anyway:
http://news.google.com/news?pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&q=%22fashion%20over%2040%22&cf=all&scoring=n&output=rss
Some extra ideas and reasons to use these links
I have been using links like these for months and months to keep up with ideas, news and updates. Besides those already listed, here are some additional benefits from this approach that I experienced:
#1 I got many ideas for pages on my niche sites.
#2 Often, these updates actually made my keyword research easier because, instead of doing a complete keyword research for a topic, I would just check the keywords my competitors are using.
#3 By checking blog updates on topics I am interested in, I managed to add a lot of great blogs to my reader. So now, instead of following updates on certain keywords, I would follow updates from the best blogs directly.
#4 The forum monitoring helped me find high quality and, more important, active forums I can use to connect with people in a niche, build links and get traffic from.
#5 More blogs mean more blog commenting opportunities. But not for the sole reason of link building. This is a great chance to actually connect to those bloggers. Don’t just comment, connect with them on the social media they use the most.
Bullseye
It is hard to keep up with everything so use these links to make it easier on you. Use keywords that are not too general if you want to have more specific results and less updates.
And don’t forget to always track you efforts, to know what is working and what isn’t. Track incoming traffic with Clicky Website Analytics to see where to spend more and where to spend less time.
Your turn: what are you using to stay up to date with your industry/niche?
Related posts:
I know that Youtube videos would be one of the best resources to really follow as video is blowing up. I never thought about adding that feature to my Google Reader for the various studying of different sites. Overload mode sometimes happens to often for me so I just try and stay as much sane as possible.
Same here. There is so much to keep up with, but if you can make nice videos, there is nothing better than get this YouTube thing good
Now Brankica, that’s a very unique post! How does you brain begin to think of these things to the point where you know what to search for to come up with this solution? Pretty impressive. Now instead of having all these feeds for different blogs, I can have an unlimited number of blogs under one feed. And it is the fastest way to discover new sites.
The YouTube feed will be absolutely beneficial to me, you know, *wink *wink
And the forum tracking is one I can really use too.
Good stuff! Thanks.
Glad you liked it. I actually found a few myself, then I learned about few of these tips from the amazing SBI, then I tracked, compared, followed and finally decided that these few posted here are the best you can do for yourself. there are also ways to follow news and Twitter for example, but it is too many updates and I think someone would kill me if I recommended those, lol
Hi Brankica,
I only use Google alerts to know about my industry and competitors activities. But never heard and tried such kind of spying tricks, these tricks looking really great and you have shared how to track from everywhere.
Hey Riya, today you can find RSS feeds for basically everything. You can even create them using Yahoo pipes for example. So besides these, you can probably make piles more of great RSS feeds to track what ever in any niche.
This is a genius strategy, Brankica. It’ll even save me time from rummaging through blogs, looking for relevant posts on a targeted topic.
It’s also great for researching – one can set up feeds and then find time to study the posts returned.
Thanks.
Yup, this usually saves me a lot of time in niches.
Hi Brankica,
This is really great advice. I don’t do much tracking at all, most of it comes from Twitter search and following the right people’s blogs (like yours). I have been using Google Alerts, but I believe I wasn’t specific enough, because I got a lot of “crap”
Jens
I still use Google Alerts, but it is hard to specify the search so it does pull up a lot of things we don’t need. These RSS feeds work a bit better for me.
Never thought of specifically tracking YouTube and Flickr. BRILLIANT. Thanks.
Oh, you would not believe how some niches can kick a$$ with those two sites
Dear Brankica,
Thank you for this post, i wrote something similar before but didn’t publish it and yours is far better and much more completed. I have not considered using youtube and flickr and I will definitely include that.
Oh! about the sparks, i’m getting only from people who I have circled now though.. Prefer the old one.
Any recommendations?
I updated the Sparks post recently, as to where to find them now. Not sure if you saw it, but the old sparks are moved, here is the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1omuZzdyIXg
Thanks Brankica,
I use SEOmoz.org’s free OpenSiteExplorer, but have used your RSS method in my Google reader.
Pulling up some great results so far.
Glad you like it, Greg!
Thanks for sharing .. I have a several niche blogs that I don’t really pay attention to, but still earn a couple of dollars a day. A few I haven’t added content to in almost a year. I just used your post to set up google reader folders for each of them … now I really don’t have much of an excuse to not make at least an occasional new post .. seeing as how I have plenty of ideas right at my fingertips
Todd, I had the same problem with one of my niche sites after I started this blog.
I completely neglected it which was wrong because it makes a nice amount of money and is maybe at 20% of what it can make.
So this way, at least I can make an occasional comment somewhere to build a link or two, or get an idea on what to write about next and just do it.
Great Post!! I was really looking for something like this, specially to keep my self up to date with my industry videos.
thanks a lot for the post.
Glad you liked it, Faissal, it really is the easiest way to keep up.
I’m overwhelmed, too! Besides Google alerts, I’ve not tried any of these other ideas. I’m going to start with boardreader.com. Thanks for all the great ideas – this is a very thorough post.
Hey Kara, welcome to my blog and glad you liked the post. Google Alerts are also great but I found that I can be more specific with the keyword with these RSS feeds and at the same time still get some nice results.
That’s a fantastic use of Google Reader Brankica. I thought I was doing something when I hit ‘like’ or stared a post in reader.
Like Riya, I’ve been using Google Alerts to keep up with my niche, along with the blogs and newsletters I’m subscribed to of course. I’ll be setting up my reader now.
This is one of those posts that you could have turned into an eBook and sold. Too late, you already gave it to me free. lol
Lol, this is called pre-selling. Now I can write a piece of crap and sell it to you, isn’t that how it works RLMAO
The only thing I use in Google reader out of all those buttons is the star. I either star the posts I want to keep listed there and find them easy or sometimes, when I have 1.000+ updates I will scan through all the feeds, start the posts that seem interesting and then mark all posts read and come back to read the starred ones when I have time (hope this made sense)
Great post as always, I enjoy reading your posts. Thank you for sharing them.
Thanks, glad you like them and hope they help
Hi Brankica,
I’ve just come over from Adrienne Smiths blog and am I glad I did.
I’ve been using RSS feeds from my fav blogs to stay up to date and only yesterday I was trawling through YouTube to find some quality videos etc. I never thought of setting up feeds for them so will be doing that next.
Thank you for making it so easy for me
Barry
I hope it will make it easier for you. It does sometimes pull up a weird result or two, but that is the risk of using auto tools. Still it makes it quicker than doing manual searches all the time.
Hi Brankica, once again another fantastic post. I’ve been busy and it’s getting harder to keep track of my niche websites. I have setup google reader but it doesn’t always return data that I feel is interesting enough to use on my sites. I know about the sources you mentioned in this post but never did I think about implementing your method. Not only will it save me time but I’ll get even more useful information all conveniently stored in one place.
I don’t know how you come up with your posts but I especially enjoyed this one a lot will implement immediately.
I hope this one will bring results to you, Zoul. It should be a quick way to stay updated so maybe it will save you time with your sites.
Hi Brankica
Great post and have just implemented them using FeedDemon RSS reader for one of my keywords, big thanks to Adrienne for pointing me in the direction of you blog.
I have been monitoring RSS post feeds but thanks to you I can expand my control centre without having to travel to all the other sites to see what’s up!
thanks and speak soon
igor Griffiths
Glad you liked it Igor, and I have to start paying Adrienne for sending me all the cool people here
Great Post B!
Staying relevant and up to date is one of the most important aspects of SEO – or being online fullstop for that matter so well done for showing some of the ways to automate or at least streamline this process.
I have been using the RankTracker plugin and have found that this one plugin provides enough data to keep the content ideas coming and the information relevant to my niche. Of course this tool makes it that much better because the alerts are based on searches people are ACTUALLY doing so when I optimise accordingly I see INSTANT results.
just my 2 cents
(yes I just tried to sell you something in your own comments thread LOL – but no aff link I swear hahahahaha….)
I’ve been reading your blog for some time now but haven’t commented yet and I just wanted to say “Thanks” for sharing all this info. I would have never thought of monitoring YouTube videos in my niceh until you pointed out the benefits. No matter how long I am in this business I am always learning
Brankica:
I have been using RSS feeds for years but I did it the old fashion way by each individual site. These are some great time saving tips for me. I just created these in my Google reader account for my niches. The only problem is that I now have so much more to read.
Thanks again.
- Rick
Thanks for posting this. I set them all up for one of my keywords and I can see already how useful this will be, especially the YouTube videos.
Brankica,
Hi, I just read Adrienne Smith’s blog and she recommended coming over to this post.
I have been using Google Reader for sometime but have never added YouTube or any of the other places you recommend adding.
I have added all of the resources you recommend.
Thank you for all of the information.
Dee Ann Rice
Wow, Brankica, once again great tips.
To confirm you would add the links you gave us in the add subscription bar?. I am most interested in the You tube and google blog search, yahoo!
I have been using google alerts, and then following top resources in my field: kevinmd, medpage etc. Nothing too fancy. I find it overwhelming when your niche is outside of: Social Media, Blogging etc as you have to keep up with both your niche and all the rest that keep you on top of the blogosphere!
Best,
Rajka
Excellent ideas, Brankica. Good on you for not suggesting news and Twitter. They COULD be useful, but not in an efficient manner.
I’m going to suggest something waaaay out there:
Learn to make a customized search engine, from Google. Then, learn how to search like a rockstar. I’ve shared this link with folks in email, but I’m not sure if it will work here. It’s my Uncluttered Technical Search Engine:
http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=013606488607683180055:jz6xscrljgq
The CSE, as they’re called, is almost like alerts, only it’s for when you have something on your mind RIGHT NOW. the part about learning to search like a rockstar means, learning to add &pws=0 to the end of queries to avoid personal search results; quoted vs. unquoted queries; different ways to phrase a search; negative keywords, e.g. apple -pie.
The thing I like about searching in the moment is that, unless you’re curating for future posts, 99% of the “information” need not come to your attention. A feed reader will soon become overwhelmed with your own personal mini-web of pages, links and resources. If you don’t get to them in a timely manner, they may become outdated. Of course, in evergreen niches, that doesn’t apply.
My personal solution to feed reader overload is Evernote, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.
Cheers,
Mitch