Will Hanke

From time to time we endure slumps where we can’t think of anything to blog about.  Every writer has ‘writers block’ and it’s no fun.  If you can’t think of anything to write, let me help.

My regular readers know I’m a fan of Google alerts, and here’s another great usage.

First, a little background.  Yahoo! Answers is a great service that lets people ask questions about anything, and other users submit answers to their question.  And when I say questions about anything, I mean anything.  Which is great - there is lots of content there that we can use.

So in your Google alerts account, set up an alert for the following:

site:answers.yahoo.com keyword

keyword should be replaced with an industry-related word or phrase that people would use in their questions that applies to you.  For instance, if you are a Missour Wine Club (cheap plug), you’d likely use ‘wine’ or even ‘wine’ and ‘missouri’.  Now anytime a question is posted that uses the word ‘wine’ in it, Google will automatically email you a link to the question.

Watch over the questions, reword and use the appropriate ones for your site.  If one person is looking for an answer to that question, there are probably hundreds more looking, too.  Why not get those visitors to your website and show how much of an expert you really are?

Will Google Alerts, business blogging, small business

The readers who frequent this blog often know I’m a big fan of Google Alerts, and I use it often to build links and keep track of a few other things.  Google Alerts is a free service from Google that emails you whenever something new has shown up on the Internets with a search query you’ve specified.

Since I’m sitting on an SEO panel tonight covering blogging, splogging and SEO, I thought I’d post a quick little ditty that you can do to keep track of who’s stealing your content (without permission).

When you blog, there are certain things that you have control over, besides the ‘meat’ of the post.  For most blogging software, you can modify other things, such as posted-by, date formatting and tagging. Somewhere you need to find something that you can make unique to your blog - a phrase, a set of random numbers, or a weird tag.  For this example I’ll use a number/letter combo: 68wcrada72

Once you’ve decided on something, make sure you incorporate it into every post as you write (as I just did).
Then head over to Google Alerts and set up your trap.

(Click to see larger image)

Make sure you add the -domain.com or else you’ll get an alert every time you post.

Now when someone steals your content and posts it on their website, you’ll get an email showing you the link to the splog.  Take appropriate action - ask the author to take down your content.  If they don’t, or won’t answer, take further steps such as flagging inappropriate/spam posts on Blogger or reporting the splog to WHOIS (if appropriate).

People are out there to steal your content.  Since we can’t stop a copy/paste, at least we can still keep tabs on what’s happening.  Don’t let people use your content freely!

Will Google Alerts, blogging, business blogging, content

Sphinn this article

I’m a big fan of Google Alerts. I love letting Google scour the web for me and provide me with a nice little email that tells me about (and links me to ) new articles about a particular subject that I may be interested in.

For example, I run a very local website called Arnold Talk (ArnoldTalk.com) which I post news articles and events that are related to my little town. So I set up a few alerts such as “arnold mo” and “arnold missouri”. Any time someone posts an article that mentions that phrase, I’ll get an email about it.

It’s great because I can have information about upcoming events before anyone else does, including the local newspaper.

So how can you use Google Alerts for your business?

Let’s say, for this example, that you run a business selling football supplies. You stock and ship footballs, helmets, pads, even trophies around the country.

You notice that your ranking for “red helmets” is low and you want to get a few links for that phrase. So you log into Google Alerts and add a new alert for that phrase. Make sure you use the quotes, or else you’ll end up with results that just mention the word ‘red’ and the word ‘helmets’ on the same page. That won’t do you much good.

So a day or two goes by and then you get an email from the Alerts telling you that there is a blog with your phrase. You click the link and see that its a high schooler who is blogging about his day, and he mentions the new red helmets they got this year. You look around and find his email address and shoot off an email similar to this:

Dear Johnny Quarterback,

Today I noticed that you had mentioned that your team got some new helmets for this years football season. Congrats!

I am an Internet marketer, and I would like to know if you’d be interested in creating a link in your recent post where you mentioned the helmets. If so, I’d be happy to pay you $5 for the link.

I hope your team does a great job this year, and wish you the best of luck on your football career.

Joe Mama
SportsRus.com

Now, it may work better for you if you just mention that you are a sports store owner, or you may want to skip that part altogether. The point is to get the link, and cheap. Since the chances are this blog isn’t read by too many people, the value of the link is not going to be high. But it’s a permanent link. And Johnny Quarterback will be thrilled to get $5 bucks.

Do you use Google Alerts to help you with your link building strategy? If not, why not? What’s more fun than using Google to beat Google?

By the way, if it works out and you get the link, I’d also follow up with him asking him not to post the fact that he sold a link (for obvious reasons).

Will Google Alerts, Marketing, link building

Here’s a couple quick ways to keep up with the latest trends in your industry.

Set up a custom news feed with Google

Go over to http://news.google.com and type in your phrase. This will bring up all the latest news that mentions that subject. If you need a specific phrase, make sure you put it in quotes.

Then click on the RSS button in the lower left corner and sign up for this custom news feed. Now every day you’ll have the latest news about your industry right there in your RSS reader.

Over time, you’ll see mentions of related items that you don’t want to read about. I suggest you go back to the Google News page and rewrite your query, using delimiters such as the plus and minus.

Get Google Alerts

While the Google news thing is cool, it’ll only give you updates on actual news items that have been submitted. Since many people are publishing items in formats besides press releases, we want to be able to capture these additions to the web, too.

To do so, we’ll set up a Google alert with our same phrase(s).

Go to http://www.google.com/alerts and you’ll see this page:

In the “Search Items” box, put in your same search criteria that you used on the news site. You can use quotes and other delimiters just as you did above.

Depending upon how often you want these alerts, choose the correct option in the “How Often” area. If you’re running a news site, you’ll want to put the “How Often” to “As it happens”. That way you can get that info onto your website as soon as possible. If you are just trying to keep up with trends, leave it at “once a day”.

Now plop in your email address. Now every time Google indexes a new page on the Internet that includes your specific phrase, you’ll get an email.

You can use these same methods to keep an eye on your competition as well, your own business name, or even mentions of specific products that you carry. Watch for bloggers that are mentioning your business and drop a comment on their site. They’ll be blown away that you visited their blog and you’ll have an even stronger chance of getting future referrals from them.

By the way, this should not be confused with Google Trends, an online way of watching search trends over time. That’s a nice tool too, but not what I was going for here.

Will Google Alerts, Google updates, beginner sem, competition, trending