If you’ve ever worked with a PR agency or consultant, a standard offering is media monitoring – tracking your press placements on a regular basis. Typically you’d get a “clip report,” which is a compilation of all your press mentions during a given time period. PR agencies usually subscribe to a media monitoring service, such as CisionMeltwater or Vocus, which can cost several thousands of dollars per year.

Media monitoring isn’t something that only PR pros can do. There are several inexpensive online tools that will alert you whenever you’re mentioned in the media, and some will even help you search, archive and organize your press coverage, too. (Tip: You can use them to keep tabs on your competitors, too.) While these tools aren’t as robust as the big guys who have PR agencies and corporations as customers, they’ll get the job done, especially if you’re a smaller business.

Here are three media monitoring tools to consider checking out. (Two of them are free!)

Google News Alerts

Even though here at VerticalResponse we use one of the paid services mentioned above to monitor our press coverage, I still have Google News Alerts set up to track our company name as well as all our competitors’ names, just in case. And guess what? Sometimes Google will pick up something that doesn’t come across the monitoring service’s radar until a day or two later.

You can customize how often you want to be alerted (as it happens, once a day or once a week), what sources (news, blogs, videos, etc.), even a preferred language and region. I personally prefer getting alerts as soon as Google finds a new piece of content, so we can react quickly if needed. Cost: Free

Newsle

Newsle is a media monitoring service that lets you know whenever you, your Facebook friends and/or LinkedIn connections are mentioned in the news or in press releases. (Newsle was acquired by LinkedIn in July.) It’s super easy to use and even has a leaderboard showing who’s mentioned the most. What I really like about Newsle, though, is the ability to see in one dashboard what my journalist connections have recently covered. Cost: Free

Trackur

Trackur isn’t free, but has some advanced options that might make it worth the price. You get features like archiving, bookmarking and collaboration tools, as well as deeper analysis on sentiment (i.e., if the coverage is favorable, negative or neutral) and overall influence (based on Klout scores). Cost: Starts at $97/month; free trial available

How do you uncover your press coverage? Have any favorite tools or tips of your own? Share ’em with us.

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