My last post talked about blogging focus and being on the lookout for writing ideas in your every day life. Sometimes, though, you need more inspiration. Luckily, we live in a world where a massive amount of new information is created each day, and Google kindly indexes it all. So you just have to find a way to search through this haystack of new information to find items relevant to you.
Finding the Needle in the Haystack with Google Alerts
Google has a wonderful free service call Google Alerts. By creating an alert you can be notified every time a news story or blog post is written about your area of interest. Let’s take an example to illustrate how this works. Say you own a store that sells Turkish rugs and you have just started a blog showcasing your knowledge of this niche industry. If you want to stay abreast of new developments in your industry you should create some Google Alerts. To do this you need a Google Account, if you don’t have one you can sign up here (it’s free).
Decide what keywords you would like to use to create your alerts. You might choose “turkish rugs”, “turkish carpets”, “kilim weaving” and other niche terms relevant to your industry. Also, you should always have an alert setup for your company name as well as your personal name so you can find out when people are talking about you. I recommend you create at least 10 alerts to assure a steady flow of relevant information to your inbox. You can setup Google Alerts to notify you daily, weekly or as soon as it happens. Google then scours every blog post, news article and web site looking for mentions of your keywords.
I can’t overstate how powerful this tool is. You can stay abreast of EVERY major development in your industry by just subscribing to a few alerts. But the real power for the small business blogger is the steady stream of blog ideas that come into your mailbox every day. These alerts, combined with the new items in your RSS Reader, should give you an endless supply of writing ideas for your blog.
