Part of your research for developing your niche site will be looking at competitor sites. You usually find these sites by searching on your site’s keywords and then looking at the top 10 results.

Even though it’s good practise to check the competitor sites regularly, most of us forget to.

There is however a very easy and efficient way of tracking activity in you niche, and that is by using Google alerts.

Using Google alerts you can get notified by email when someone mentions a particular keyword in a blog, website,video etc.

Here is partial screen shot showing two alerts that I’ve set up:

I’ve chosen comprehensive which includes all media and I get an email one a day. An example is shown below:

All you need is Google account (free if you don’t already have one), and you can configure them here: http://www.google.com/alerts/