Using Google Alerts to Monitor the Web

Providing fresh quality content ahead of competitors is one of the main keys of the blogging success. But that is not easy to be always “on top” of the things, especially if your blogging empire covers multiple areas of interests.

And here is another free Google service, which can be quite handy to assist you with the Web monitoring for news or any other posts on topics of your interests. It is like having young assistants who are working online and selecting for you the information of interest.

Service is simple, reliable, and with simplistic Google-style interface:

• Enter a search query you wish to monitor.
• Chose result type from the drop-down list, selecting from the following options:
• Everything.
• News.
• Blogs.
• Video.
• Discussions.
• Books.
• Chose monitoring frequency:
• As-it happens.
• Once a day.
• Once a week.
• Results quality:
• Only the best results.
• All results.
• Delivery:
• Your email.
• Your feed.

Website address: http://www.google.com/alerts

How to administrate automatically interactive tasks on multiple social media accounts?

If you consider Twitter as an essential element of your marketing campaign, you may increase its effectiveness significantly by creating automatic rules of interaction between your different accounts in various social media structures.

Many professionals admit that the new service with pretty strange domain http://ifttt.com can be a cornerstone of the automation. IFTTT acronym has, however, pretty descent explanation - it means “If this, then that.” Think of all the things you could do if you were able to define any task as: when something happens (this) then do something else (that). The “this part” of a task is the Trigger. Some example Triggers are "I'm tagged in a photo on Facebook" or "I tweet on Twitter." The “that part” of a task is the Action. Some example Actions are "send me a text message" or "create a status message on Facebook."

Using this free service, you can set up list of rules-based automatic interactions between Twitter and other popular web apps, including Dropbox, Facebook, or Tumblr. For instance, you can set up a task that will automatically save your Twitter favorites to your Evernote notebook, or a task that will copy your Twitter pictures to your Flickr account, and send you an email, when the task is completed. Your options are endless.

Channels of interaction available:

So, take some time, define useful rules, and let the service do all the administrative jobs.

Website: http://ifttt.com/