Google Alerts for instant info

I don’t think i’ve ever mentioned Google Alerts on this blog before and yet it’s probably one of the most useful tools you can have as a webmaster.

It’s simple… key in your website name, let’s say ‘BeerChief’, give your email, hit ‘create’ and bam…

Anytime the word ‘BeerChief’ is mentioned or picked up by the googlebots, you’ll get an email telling you where it has been mentioned. It means as soon as an article or blog post has been written, you’ll find it straight away. So once i launch BeerChief, i’ll be able to keep track of each and every article, forum or blog post written about BeerChief.

So nothing slips under the radar and i can respond to and act upon criticism or praise etc… let’s say BeerChief’s server is knocked out but i’m not aware of it… no doubt somebody will post a question or a comment somewhere asking if it is offline and i’ll instantly see that and can then act upon it…

So Google Alerts is really cool feature and i high recommend you use it for your own name or blog or sites as not only can it act as an ‘early warning device’, it can also hook you up with fans and loyal readers and ensures every word written about you is seen. I’d say i have about 20+ google alerts at the minute… the danger is of course, you don’t want to pick a popular word/s, otherwise you could be bombarded with emails

But you can also set google alerts to notify you of events once a day or once a week so you can control how many alerts you get… but i like to keep them ‘as they happen’.

So within the next few minutes, i’ll get an email telling me ‘BeerChief’ has been blogged about and it’ll give me a link to this blog post Pretty cool!

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