Hi All,
The next 30DC Pre-Season lesson has been recorded by Brent Hodgson of Market Samurai fame. The lesson in on Google Alerts which is a fabulous free service from Google where you can receive emails alerting you when Google finds new content in relation to a specific keyword or keyphrase.
The video is available now in the Training Centre.
Ed
I’m using Google Alerts since a long time. It’s a fantastic free tool for market research, staying updated about your niche, spy on competitors or simple get ideas for content.
Gunter
It is also handy to follow trends by post volume. You can spot trends and see the news that is generating the buzz in real time. The biggest deal is being able to see all the news as it happens, and know everything that is going on. Using the recommended browser add-ins, you can see previews of interesting pages without ever leaving the reader list. The alerts, reader and tools can make you an expert if you are not one already.
A good way to make sure you have the right keyword while using Google Alerts is to use Google AdWords keyword tool.
A better way then AdWords is to use Market Samurai.
I specifically use Google Alerts to track backlinks when I post videos on YouTube and other video sharing sites (there are so many now!).
Videos are a great channel to drive backlinks so …
The first thing I always put in my video description is a link to my landing page. Then I load that landing page into Google Alerts and I can get a sense of the backlinks populating other sites.
Steinar,
You can refine your link tracking with a couple of simple but advance search operators when you create your Google Alerts.
Try this the next time:
link:yourdomain.com (this is what you type into Google Alerts)
One issue though, this operator will find ALL links, even new internal site links which is obviously not a backlink, so…
To exclude “internal” links from showing up in your Google Alerts you can modify the search further by doing the following:
link:yourdomain.com -site:yourdomain.com
This will tell Google you don’t want to know about new links created within your own site because you obviously already know about those since YOU created them.
Good luck with this year’s challenge!