What should I do in the first week?
The first week is for trust, not coverage. One well-checked monitor teaches you more than five unreviewed ones. Use this sequence even if you already know the product shape.
In the first seven days:
- Create one monitor with a narrow brief and a small source list.
- Let it run on hourly or daily unless the topic is genuinely breaking.
- Open every result and click through to the original URL.
- Remove sources that only produce noise; add at most a few missing public sources you already trust.
- Connect the destination you actually read and send a test if the channel supports it.
- Rewrite the brief once based on what you saw. Only then create a second monitor.
What “good” looks like
You can explain, in one sentence, why each alert arrived. You can open the original. False positives dropped after the brief rewrite. Nothing important you expected was missing for a reason you understand (source not public, schedule too slow, or the event did not match the brief).
What to avoid
- Attaching every suggested source “just in case”.
- Routing every monitor to SMS on day one.
- Treating a summary as a fact without opening the original.
- Creating overlapping monitors that will double-alert the same story.