Alert words

Track what your customer says when they need you, not what your product is called.

Keyword alert tools are easy to set up and hard to make useful. Track your category name and you'll get hundreds of mentions a day, mostly from people writing about the topic rather than people with the problem. The alerts that work track how a real person describes their situation in a post.

What you need

1. Who the customer is and the problem they have.
2. Any real posts or messages from customers. Their actual words are the best place to start.

Steps

1. Picture the bad day. Write down a few moments when the problem shows up for your customer. Each moment has its own language.
2. Write what they'd post. For each moment, write how they'd say it to strangers online: plain, slightly messy, no marketing words.
3. Keep the ones that mean "I need this". Questions and frustrations beat general discussion. "How do I..." and "anyone else struggling with..." usually beat the name of a category.
4. Cut the noise. Delete anything that's mostly said by people selling, teaching or reporting on the topic.
5. Keep phrases short. Most free tools match exact text, so two to five words work best. Add the obvious variants.
6. Read them every morning. An alert is only useful if someone reads it. A few minutes a day is enough.
7. Prune weekly. Keep the phrases that led to a real conversation. Delete the ones that never do.

Output

Phrases to track:
- "<phrase>"

Phrases to exclude:
- "<word>"

Dropped as noise: <words, and why>

Rules

• Their words, never yours. If a phrase sounds like your homepage, delete it.
• Fewer, sharper phrases beat a long list.
• An alert is a reason to read a post, not a reason to message someone.
• If alerts arrive faster than you can read them properly, cut phrases.

Example

For a made-up bookkeeping app for freelancers:

Track: "hate doing my invoices", "freelance taxes help", "how do freelancers track expenses", "spreadsheet for invoices" Exclude: "hiring", "our firm", "we offer" Dropped: "accounting software", "fintech" (mostly vendors and journalists)

With MyPip (coming)

Keyword alerts find people who typed your words. MyPip finds people who mean them. When the MyPip MCP is live, this skill will be able to compare your alerts with the people MyPip found, so you know which phrases are worth keeping.