What are people saying about you? Is your business being talked about on blogs? What is being said? Is this something you need to address before it gets out of control? Monitoring the blogosphere has become a cost of being a part of the Internet world that we live in today.

In blog marketing businesses need to be proactive about managing their digital reputation. In addition to monitoring what is beings said about your company and its brands, it’s necessary to know what’s being said about your competitors. This can put you ahead and potentially into new opportunities.

You can track what is being said yourself, but that takes time. You can hire another company, but that takes more money. Monitoring blog conversations can be done using tools available on the internet whether you choose to do this yourself or hire someone else.

Here are some Great Blog monitoring tools;

1. Monitor News feeds with Yahoo News or Google News.
2. Search blog results only using Google Blog search.
3. Technorati has many advanced blog search capabilities.
4. Be emailed alerts anytime your company name or brand name is detected by Google on the Internet with Google Alerts. This alert can be set to by source type (blogs, web, news, all, etc).
5. Search forums or create alerts with boardtracker.com
6. Monitor blog conversations and which other blogs link to this conversation with BlogPulse conversation tracker.
7. Watch trends in how often your company name or brand is used with blogpulse.com trend tool.

By combining several of these tools, you can get a good idea of who is talking about you, your company or your competition.

Related posts:

1. Monitoring for Market Intelligence
2. Start Social Media Marketing by Listening
3. Your Digital Reputation
4. 5 Steps in Launching Your Social Media Marketing Campaign
5. Nielsen NetRatings