The Key to Online Business Success - Position Yourself as an Expert

If you want to be successful online (or offline for that matter) it is essential that you are able to give your customers the most current information about the current information and trends in your industry as they happen.

That means being aware of information as it happens. That could involve a lot of time and effort scouring the internet finding information about your industry on news websites, your competitors websites, blogs, forums, and social media pages.

The challenge as a business owner is to be able to keep track of a large amount of information in the shortest period of time to position yourself as an expert in your industry.

There are a couple of ways that I do this.

1. Google Alerts - You can set up a number of alerts so that Google will track new information as it becomes available and then send you an email telling you where to find this information. I set up 8 to 10 alerts covering the main search terms for my industry and then Google sends me an email whenever new content becomes available on the internet.

I always use comprehensive alerts for this purpose. This monitors websites, blogs, vide, news and group websites. I set the frequency to daily.

I then set aside 15 minutes each day to monitor the alerts and review this information, and make relevant notes that I can refer to when I need to.

2. Feeddemon - Feeddemon is a fantastic tool for being able to quickly review new content on the blogs that are of interest to you in your industry. I have about half a dozen blogs that I follow closely and about another half a dozen that I follow not so closely. About half of these blogs relate directly to web design and seo, and about half of them relate to business ownership. This allows me to quickly stay up to date with the relevant information in my industry. I also post comments which give me links back to my website.

Feeddemon allows you to monitor your blogs all from one application. You are also able to search for blogs that you might be interested in following using your key search terms.

I set aside about 10-15 minutes per day to review these blogs and make comments where I feel that I can contribute to the discussion.


These 2 tools allow me to stay up to date with my industry for about 20 to 30 minutes per day. In this time I also do some link building via the blogs as well. I find this a very efficient use of my time as I am getting ideas for new content, staying up to date with my industry and link building all in about half an hour per day.

The Key to Online Business Success - Position Yourself as an Expert

Are you tired of people stealing your stuff?

Have you ever had your house broken into and some of your stuff stolen?

Really sucks doesn't it.

Last time it happened to me they made a huge mess in our house as well.

I was pretty p....d off.

Well, it happens on the internet as well. You might have even experienced it already. It usually happens a bit like this, you start creating some great content for your website, and you post it to some article directories.

And then one day, you come across what looks a lot like the article you wrote. It might be on another website, or a different article directory, or on a blog somewhere. But the only thing is that someone else has taken credit for your article and they are sending links to a different website.

Not happy, right.

I guess the good news is that on the internet it is easier to find the culprits than it can be in real life. Don't get me worng here - I want people to take my articles and repost them on their websites or blogs. I just want them to acknowledge me as the author and leave my links intact.

Here is what I do to protect my content.

1. I create a Google Alert.

When I do this I usually use a keyphrase from the article or the headline of the article. I make it a comprehensive alert, and I request a daily email whenever Google finds the phrase or headline.

I use a specific term for these alerts as I am just looking for copies of my articles. These are different to the alerts that I use to monitor what is going on in my industry on the web.

2. I use Copyscape.

Copyscape have a free version and a paid version. Once you have a few articles out there the paid version is great value for money. Once a week they send me an email with copies they have found for my articles.

And that is about it.

When I find that someone has copied one of my articles without leaving my links I contact the website owner and advise them. Most often they are posted on obscure article directories.

I give them the web address of my original article and the address of the article on their website and request that the copy be removed.

If they are posted on third party websites I follow the same procedure.

Very rarely are they published on the website of the person copying the article because they are looking for backlinks. I usually find that it is difficult to establish the ownership of the sites that the links are directed to but I do use Whois to do this.

Best case scenario for me is that I get the copied article removed from the website and I then repost the original article with my links intact.

Are you tired of people stealing your stuff?