Someone is Probably Blogging About Your Business RIGHT NOW!

Normally the first step a business takes in exploring the blogosphere is to start blogging themselves.  But instead of diving in with a new blog, is it better to first understand what bloggers are currently saying about your business?

I say it is.  Which means that you need to begin monitoring the blogosphere to see what bloggers are saying about your company.  Before your eyes glaze over and you offer that you have no idea how to get started, relax.  Keeping tabs on what bloggers are saying about your company is painfully easy to do.  Seriously.

Here's how you get started:

1 - Go to Google Blog Search.

2 - Do a search for your business.  For example, I'll do a search for my blog, The Viral Garden.

3 - Notice there are around 1,600 search results.  These results can be sorted by date, down to the last hour.  Ok, now I have a list of results for what people are saying about me now.  But I want to continue to access this list, and when Google receives a new result, I want to know about it without coming back and doing a new search. 
Look down at the left sidebar.  See the subscribe section?  There I can set it up to either send me an email alert every time Google gets a new result for "the viral garden", or I can set it up as an RSS feed that will send the results to my feed reader.  Since I already use Bloglines as my feed reader, I will click RSS.

4 - Since I have set up this search as an RSS feed that will be delivered to my feed reader (Bloglines) automatically, I am now set.  I've also done the same with Google Blog Search for the term "mack collier" as well.

5 - Now let's do the same thing with Google Blog Search to alert us when someone links to your blog.  Go back to Google Blog Search, and type in link: http://www.yourblogsURLhere.com  This will show you what sites are linking to your blog, and how many there are.  Here's the results for when I searched for sites linking to my blog.  Now you can either set up this as an email alert, or add this to your feed reader as we did in Step 4.

6 - Now you are completely set.  Anytime anyone mentions your business in a blog post, or links to your blog, you will know about it, thanks to Google.  I have feeds set up that give me the results anytime a blogger mentions me, my blog, or links to my blog, on their site.  The picture at the right shows what this looks like in Bloglines.  The number in parentheses is how many results you currently have for each feed.