Go To Ebay Home | Add to Favorites
Tools For Online Tracking
Copyright 2005 Sharon Housley
In order to determine which advertising and marketing efforts are effective you must have ways to measure the results of those efforts. Alerts and instant notifications can be instrumental in monitoring search engine position, trademarked terms, monitoring competitors and staying abreast of online occurrences. And, of course, the notification can be used for "ego searches".
Ego Searches
What is an ego search? Find out where your name or company is mentioned, view forum posts or online articles that mention your name or company.
Trademarks
The best offense is a good defense. By monitoring newsgroups or search engines for trademarked terms, you often head off a future conflict. As a trademark owner, it is your responsibility to actively protect your mark. Otherwise, you could lose your trademark rights. Monitoring tools send immediate notification should any suspected trademark infringements occur.
Search Position
Statistics show that more than 85% of Internet users find web sites with the help of the search engines. Therefore, a website's search engine position is crucial to its success. Prudent webmasters regularly check their search engine position. Monitoring fluctuations and re-indexing of major search engines affects keyword terms and phrases. Monitoring of positions will alert webmasters to any shifts before sales decline.
Competitor Watch
Monitoring newsgroups for mentions of competitors may allow you opportunities to chime in and offer an alternative solution in a helpful, friendly way. Knowing exactly what your online competitors are doing provides a competitive edge that can be used to your advantage.
Website Downtime
Accessibility is the most critical measure of your website's performance. If customers can't access your site, they can't shop; and if they can't shop, they can't buy. More important, your business could gain a bad reputation among your customers, which translates into negative word of mouth and even worse, if you're highly visible, negative press. So regardless of what else you monitor, you want to monitor websites for downtime.
Take a look at the various tools available and how they can be used to keep you current on relevant issues.
WebAlerts - Recieve email updates of the latest relevant Google results based on your choice of query or topic. Alerts can be sent based on information in Google News, Google Searches or both.
http://www.google.com/webalerts
PubSub - PubSub matches your requests against new information as it appears real time. Searches can be categorized to search, blog entries, SEC/EDGAR Filings, press releases, news group posts or flight delays.
http://www.pubsub.com
Ego Alerts - Google news search turned into an RSS feed.
http://www.justinpfister.com/gnewsfeed.php
Ebay Alerts - Ebay Alerts monitoring will create an RSS feed to monitor Ebay auctions for specific keywords or phrases. When a new item that contains those keywords is added to Ebay you will receive notification via your RSS feed!
http://www.freebiddingtools.com
Amazon Alerts - Generate a URL which you can use to automatically search Amazon.com with your favorite RSS news reader. It will automatically update you when new items meet your search criteria. I personally use it to look for new books on topics I'm interested in, and I have the defaults set to do the same, but you can adjust it to search any of Amazon's stores. You can also adjust the search order and what kind of items you wish to search.
http://www.oxus.net/amazon
Internet Seer - InternetSeer remotely monitors your website to insure that your site is available 24/7. If InternetSeer is unable to reach your site, we will send you an immediate e-mail alert that your site is unreachable.
http://www.internetseer.com
NetNewsTracker - NetNews Tracker is a clipping service for Usenet newsgroups. Newstracker searches newsgroups twice daily for any specified words or phrases and delivers alerts via e-mail. Newstracker can be used to monitor newsgroups for names, company names, products, URLs, or any other topic of interest.
http://www.netnewstracker.com
Other Suggested Resources -
Monitoring Tools - Monitoring Tools is a directory of online monitoring tools and applications
http://www.monitoring-tools.net
Monitoring Software - Monitoring Software is a collection of downloadable monitoring software solutions.
http://www.monitoring-software.net
About the author:
Sharon Housley manages marketing for NotePage, Inc. http://www.notepage.netand FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com.
Source: Article Directory
How To Find The Hottest Products To Sell On Ebay
Most people who sell on eBay would like to be in the position of selling highly sought after items. But how do you know which products are the ones that are in high demand?You might not have realised it, but eBay itself has several ways for you to determine exactly what these items are! In fact eBay gives you four ways to do this. Whilst this data is only available on ebay.com, depending on the categories in which you operate, the information may well be of interest no matter which eBay country site you use. Items In DemandIn this part of Seller...
Hurricane Katrina Donations Could Be Many Millions More - Ebay Sellers Try In Vain To Help
Yesterday I saw a mention in someone’s email ezine about a kind person who had an eBay auction with the proceeds going 100% to help victims of the horrible Hurricane Katrina.It struck a chord with me because I had wanted to set up something similar, but found that the “eBay Giving Works” charity program seems to be terribly flawed for us small sellers. I had researched it the day before, eBay goes through Mission Fish to handle the administrative tasks and distribution.Here in a nutshell is how I understand it works. You set up an eBay auction and pledge a percentage of the proceeds to go to a c...
Shill Bidding: How Scumbag Bidders Rob Honest Sellers Like You
How Honest Sellers Can Be Robbed By Dishonest BuyersShill bidding deal is a 21st century version of a confidence game. The purpose of shill bidding is to buy merchandise at an artificially low price which can then be resold for a healthy profit. It involves either two different buyers or one buyer who possesses two different eBay IDs. Shill bidding is often easy to detect and therefore is usually more successful with an inexperienced seller who doesn't know what to look for. We can't know for certain, but most likely shill bidders look for sellers with low feedback because they know a more experienced seller might realize what is going on. Shill bidding is only worthwhile with an expensive item. If you are selling many low priced, high-volume items, shill b...
|
 |
|
|
Affiliate Marketing: The Easiest Business
Copyright 2005 Benjamin ScottThere are many ways to make a living. Some people work many long hours a week slaving in a hot factory. Some people go to work for long days in a cubicle, meeting som... |  |
| Making Money Online
"Earn a six figure income from your home online with hardly any work!" How many times have you come across a website or e-mail saying something like this? Chances are it happens a lot. Obviously it's not true, but we all wish it was. That doesn't mean that there's not money to be made online. The net is probably the best place to sell products. With that in mind, all you need are products. The best part of it all is that you do... | |
| The Power Of Dogs
Well first of all I was always a cat owner, till my husband bought our first Chihuahua (Stitch) in 2002, Stitch was about 6 weeks old and was generally purchased for our children and it stud that was till he was about 5 months or so. Then I started to notice that he was starting to favor me and follow me around more and more everyday, one day I hid from him and watched him run up and down the hallway from the crack in the bedroom door, until he found me and it just melted my heart, my cats never did that and after that he became ALL MINE Stitch stole my heart. Around a month later my mother handed down her old sewing machine to me, I tried making everything that came to mind but... | |
| The Dangers Of Making Your Business To Dependent On Ebay
eBay presents a great opportunity for small businesses to become very successful, but putting all your eggs in one basket has never been a good idea, even when the basket is eBay.If you are currently making a living on eBay it may be wise to consider opening up other avenues of income for several good reasons.One reason is that eBay has the right to cancel all your listings at any time at their discretion. This is not unfair in the sense that eBay has to keep an eye on infringing listings to keep the marketplace safer for all. Only thing is that if you h... | |
| 7 Tips For Selling Expensive Collectibles On Ebay
Recently, a friend asked me to help her brother sell his collection on Lladro glass figurines on eBay. These are expensive glass collectibles and I knew nothing about them - but I don't have to. The principles for selling expensive collectibles on eBay are the same, regardless of what is being sold. Obviously, like any eBay auction, the seller must have a powerful listing with great pictures. This is always true regardless of what the merchandise is. Expensive collectibles offer splendid opportunities, but also ... | |
| Used Cars For Sale On Ebay
There are thousands of used cars for sale on eBay everysingle day. In fact, eBay Motors is the most profitablesales division on eBay and naturally there are manyentrepreneurs who are interested in jumping into thismarket. For instance, eBay claims it sells an SUV every nineseconds and is the biggest online car dealer in America,exceeding the traditional car companies. In fact, there are15 million cars sold over the Internet each year - andgrowing.The recent rapid growth of the consignment business modelhas made the used car market even mor... | |
| How To Get The Best Shopping Deals Over The Internet?
Online shopping has taken over the Internet by storm where convenience and simplicity has replaced, or at least complimented, more conventional shopping in specialty stores or malls. Although the shopping experience has always been fun and a stress reliever for many, online... | |
| How To Avoid Fraud, Deceit & Scams!
The world is full of people who feel they can take advantage of others to obtain their goals in life. Fraud, Deceit & Scams happen in the real world every day. Just tune into your local news to hear about them. But, Fraud, Deceit & Scams also happen in the virtual world as well. And, unfortunately they often hit those who can lease afford the losses.Online we are always inundated with "get rich quick schemes" and their claims of "overnight success". If you're like me you find this kind of s.p.a.m clogging up your email box on a daily bases. They tell... | |
| The Real Secret To Finding Hot Niche Markets!
Finding a niche market is simple. Finding a PROFITABLE niche market is a little harder, but it's still easy once you know what you are doing. Otherwise, you will end up like 90% of the other niche marketers out there who spend weeks or months on a niche market only to find out there is no money to be made there. Luckily I will reveal the secrets to finding a profitable niche market later in this article.There are literally hundreds of ways to find niche markets. You can spend your time searching for popular keywords using ... | |
|
|