Staying Up On Your Market

As a small business owner, (especially professional service businesses) you likely understand the importance of content marketing. If you haven’t a clue what that means... Content marketing is the publishing and distribution of valuable content used to educate, inform, engage, and build your audience.

But content marketing is an active process, and staying involved means staying connected, and keeping up with the latest trends and news in your industry and niche.

In short, you need to be staying up on your market.

By setting up a workflow to utilize some free tools you can achieve some pretty incredible things when you think about it. There is no way we could keep up on amount of stuff, with the convenience and effectiveness that we can today, thanks to the internet and instant global communication.

What we are going to do is zero in on the places we should be focusing on and monitoring.

We will be setting up listening posts, automated web-wide alerts, and place-marks on the relevant sites we want to remember or save.

So without further ado, here are some of the best methods for staying up on your market.

Bookmarking

The first thing you need to start doing, given you have identified your target market, is start bookmarking the sites you come across while browsing and researching whats out there. You can bookmark using a site like delicious, (which may be shutting down soon) or just saving the sites to your bookmarks tab/folders in your browser.

Try to classify the site when you save it, in some meaningful way, to help you easily identify the type of site and potential partnership/or competitor. If the site is a potential partner, strict competition, a great blog, main description of the site, etc. This classification is whatever words or tags, or method you want to use that will remind you of what the site is about, and if there is potential to work together in some form or another.

This is super market research, as it gives you tremendous industry insight on whats actually out there, which will show you any gaps, opportunities, or ideas that you wouldn’t otherwise have known.

Exercise: Setup a delicious account or folder in your bowser tab entitled “market,” and start bookmarking with tags and classification.

RSS Feeds

RSS is simple. But it’s brilliant. It actually stands for really simple syndicate. It is a universally used format that allows you to subscribe to “feeds“ from your favorite online publishers and blogs, and automatically receive instant updates, conveniently organized and fed into an aggregator service, or feed reader.

For more on RSS, here’s an article on managing your RSS feeds.

RSS saves us massive amounts of time by not having to go visit each and every website we are interested in, in order to see what new content they have published.

Exercise: When you find a blog or website that publishes content of interest, click on the little orange icon with white stripes and add it to google reader, or whatever feed reader service you prefer.

Google Alerts

Google alerts allow us to monitor the world wide news on whatever it is we are specifically interested in, delivered to our doorstop, consolidated, instantly.

You can setup keyword alerts for anything. You can use them for tracking keywords you’re trying to rank for, and words you want to know when they get mentioned such as your name, product name, and research terms such as music market research. Also article titles, (so we can keep track of article placements/syndications) and FAQ’s in your niche.

This way, when someones asks a question in your area of expertise, you can quickly swoop in and answer that question. This is good for positioning, and being a helpful expert in your area of expertise.

Exercise: Go to google.com/alerts, create an account if you don’t already have a google account, and setup a couple alerts. Start with your name, your market, and a keyword phrase you are interested in hearing about and learning whats going on with.

Avoiding Overwhelm

The only real problem is… You guessed it... Theres so MUCH stuff. So many blogs, sites, ideas, ahhh! We can only read/write so many blog posts and keep up with so many different channels.

The ANSWER is of course a Simple, Targeted Strategy

1. Pick topics.

2. Choose number of blogs to read and keep up with, reasonably…

1. 3. Don’t overdo it on the google alerts.

4. Always keep it slow and conscious at first.