Day 18: Create Google Alerts For Your Blog [BBBB1]

NB: This is the 18th installment in The Inspired Solo’s Build a Better Business Blog in One Month series. Designed to help solo lawyers and other professionals boost their blog’s performance, the series consists of a daily lecture and task (or tasks) that focus on one “blog improvement project” at a time. Each post in the series is tagged with “[BBBB1]“. You can start the program at any time. Catch up with other BBBB1 posts here.

Build a Better Business Blog, One Block At a Time

Day 18: Lecture and Task

Today’s installment in the Build a Better Business Blog series is all about Google alerts: what they are, why they’re important, how to create and manage them.

What Are Google Alerts?

Google Alerts are simply emails that you ask Google to send to you with a list of all news items or blog entries/website changes (or both) that match certain search terms you provide. You tell Google what you want it to look for and send you, where you want the alerts to be delivered (i.e., your email address) and how often you want them to be sent (once a day or “as it happens”).

Google then takes those terms and keeps tabs on all changes to the pages it searches for those terms for you. When a blog item is posted, for instance, that contains your search terms, Google packages it up along with all other blog or news items with those terms mentioned, and mails it off to you with links, titles to the pages, the name of the site, and a brief excerpt.

How Can Google Alerts Help Business Bloggers?

Using Google Alerts keeps you several steps ahead of the game by letting you know what people are writing about your profession, your business, your competitors, and you in a quite timely fashion.

The value of this information is obvious: if you know someone’s got a problem with your business, for instance, you can act quickly to correct it. If a well-known blogger posts a question that you can answer (because it concerns your profession), you can be one of the first to respond with the answer. If your competitor makes a major gaffe — or achieves a major success — you can read about it quickly and decide whether there’s an opportunity there, either for your business or for you to learn something.

Additionally, Google Alerts can help you find new topics to blog about within your blog’s focus area. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve created a blog post based on one of my Google Alerts for my Tramadol Diaries blog. All news items and blog posts about fibromyalgia, chronic pain, chronic fatigue syndrome, and other relevant keywords come into my email inbox throughout the day, and I can use those alerts to create new blog posts, thus staying ahead of the curve of public interest.

How to Create Google Alerts For Your Business and Your Blog

First things first: if you don’t have a free Google account yet, you should set one up. Your Gmail account will do fine (and if you don’t have one of those yet, I can only strongly encourage you to nab one now — it will make managing life, not just your Google Alerts, so much easier).

Now, go to the Google Alerts page and you’ll see this:

Screenshot: Google Alerts

Simply type keywords into the “Search Terms” box — just as if you were searching for these keyword terms on Google. Select “Comprehensive” (which will get you results from other blogs as well as news sites), and then choose “as it happens” or “once a day.” (Which you choose is a matter of preference. I typically select “once a day” for most of my terms except for my name and my business name; items mentioning either are of sufficient importance to me that I want to know about them as soon as possible.) Then type in your email address in the “Deliver to” box, and click “create alert.”

Repeat as often as necessary for each of your search terms. I would not recommend having just one alert for all your terms, as the results could be overly long and hard to scan. One alert per search term or related terms works best for me. For example, I have one alert that searches for "sheryl sisk schelin" OR "sherrie sisk" OR "sheryl schelin" and another that looks for "inspired solo".

What Should You Search For on Google Alerts?

It depends on your blog topic, your business and its nature, and your interests, of course, but here are some ideas to get you started:

• Your name, and all variations thereof
• Your business’s name and all variations thereof
• Your blog name and all variations thereof
• Keywords related to the services you provide
• The name of your competitor(s) and major variations thereof
• Any pending legislation that might impact your business or practice area
• The name of any licensing or regulatory body that impacts your business or practice area

Take this list solely as a starting point! Add whatever search terms you think would be helpful to your marketing and blogging efforts.

Managing Your Google Alerts

Once these alerts start rolling in, you’ll need some system in place to manage them so that they don’t clutter your inbox and so that you can call them back up when needed. This is where Gmail is particularly useful.

Create a series of labels for incoming alerts based on the alert itself. For instance, you can assign @alerts-name to the alerts on your name and variations of your name or @alerts-bizname for alerts on your business’s name. Create one label for each alert. Tip: use the “@” symbol to make sure your label names will remain at the top of your list of alerts.

Now, create filters to assign these labels automatically to the incoming messages. Whether you have these filters send the mail direct to the archives (skipping the inbox) is up to you. I prefer to have my alerts remain in my inbox so I can review them. Then I can simply select them and archive them together by clicking on the label name in the left-hand side of my Gmail account page. The best way to assign these labels via filtering is to use the from:(googlealerts-noreply@google.com) function in conjunction with the subject line (which will be your alert search terms).

That’s it! Now, you can use these alerts to help you create future blog posts, keep tabs on your business reputation and your competitors, and keep up on all events and pending legislation or other possible changes that might affect your profession!