How to stay updated on everything in your industry

A major part of your inbound marketing will involve staying updated on all the recent news and developments in your industry. Most of your content you publish will be based on actual events, where you’ll be weighing in with your thoughts.

As you probably already know, thought leadership is an effective way of establishing trust between you and your prospects. However, that can only happen when you’re publishing relevant and meaningful content. Commentaries, sharing stories, video discussions and podcasts are all ways you can join the discussion and express your views.

Nevertheless, staying well-informed plays a central role. And you want to have all the facts to back up your claims, to avoid any unnecessary embarrassment.

So how do you set out to find all this information – and stay updated on everything in your industry? Here you’ll find some easy steps that will set you on the right path.

How to stay updated on everything in your industry

RSS Reader

First up, get yourself an RSS reader and subscribe to all the relevant blogs. It’s a great and efficient way of having everything organized in one place. Plus some programs such as Pulse and Reeder (Mac) have social sharing immediately available to make posting even easier.

Google Reader is another alternative you should check out. Although you will be restricted to sharing stories on Google+, as it doesn’t appear to have options for Twitter and Facebook.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts essentially allows you to receive email updates whenever Google finds something that matches your search terms.

Basically, you want to set up alerts at least for the following terms: your company name, website, product, names of employees, competitors and industries you’re working in.

Twitter Search

The beauty of Twitter is that the conversation happens in real-time. Meaning that whenever a major story breaks, you can be sure to find people discussing about it.

There’s always something to be said on Twitter, and the best thing you can do is join the conversation.

For instance Twitter’s Advanced Search allows you to search for specific terms based on location, mood, and people. Which can allow you to find tweets about your areas of interest and fully engage people.

LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn is another handy tool to stay up to date with current events. The added benefit here is you’ll also get to network and connect with people who are in the same industry as you – and also folks who might be your target audience.

Simply search for groups that are relevant to your business and join them. Most of the time people will share stories and ask questions to specific problems that you can respond to. And also don’t forget about your news feed either.

Relevant Blogs

Blogs are another great source of information. Along with the news being reported, you also get people posting their own opinions on topics. Where you can either respond by commenting on their post – or publish your own response from your blog explaining why you agree or disagree with their views.

To find relevant blogs, do a quick search on Technorati, and a simple Google search with keyword + blog(s).

Once you find the blogs that suit your purpose, subscribe to their RSS feeds by using one of the programs mentioned above.

Having something meaningful to say will certainly help elevate you to expert status. But in order to get there, you and everyone in your business have to be up to speed on the subject matter at hand.

Got any other tips that we missed? We’d love to hear your thoughts, and don’t forget to subscribe to Cuutio’s RSS feed.

Photo by joiseyshowaa via Flickr

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