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The internet is changing every single day, and along with that change we see news and marketing trends coming and going faster than anything that could happen in the physical world. One of the biggest problems that newcomers to internet marketing face is simply sheer overload of information. If you try to keep track of every single change in your market or niche, you’ll go crazy. But how can you tell which trends are important and which ones aren’t?
Learn to Let Go
The first and most important lesson any online marketer can learn is that you can’t beat yourself up for missing some new important trend. It happens to everybody, and you have to be able to learn when to let go. It might be really difficult, especially in the beginning, but eventually you’ll learn how to cherry pick the information that is most relevant to you and let the rest of it slip on past. You don’t have to read every update that comes through your RSS subscriptions, you don’t need to sit on your Twitter news feed and check every single update; you don’t even have to reply to every email that comes into your inbox. And trust me, it’s going to be hard at first, but you don’t have to do it without help.
Fine Tune Your Alerts
Google has an awesome tool called Google Alerts that allows you to set specific alerts for news from blogs or websites that contains certain keywords. You can choose the keywords, and by doing so keep track of any information about you, your business, and hot topics that you deal with specifically on a day to day basis. Google Alerts will send emails directly to your inbox with all the notifications. You can set it to deliver in real time, once a day, or once a week. Once a day is usually the best option because real time can start to really clutter up your inbox.
The same sort of thing can be done with Twitter as well, with services like HootSuite or Tweetdeck. This lets you keep your finger on the pulse of what’s going on around you without the need to filter through all the background noise and false alarms. You can take a reactive approach to everything of concern that immediately interests you.
Skim for Stories
I know I just recommended not going through your whole Twitter news feed every day, but sometimes doing just that can help you out. The idea is not to spend too much time doing it. Every now and then, just skim down over all the tweets for the past few hours. Don’t read each one, but look for anything that jumps out at you. You never know what you might run into just by chance. Again, do this sparingly and don’t put too much stock in it. You won’t always find something useful, but you may just run across that one item that sparks a new idea.
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