Protoscopic

Google Alerts has a myriad of uses. We will approach this subject again in other contexts, but today I want to talk about using it for relationship building. As we discussed in a previous article, developing relationships with other motivated site builders in your space is an excellent way to benefit both of your efforts.

One difficult component in doing this is it’s hard to find people who are motivated and promising, but not so big that they get no benefit out of working with you. If you just go and search for your keywords, you will basically find the people who have already “made it.” We’re looking for people who are going to “make it,” but are still climbing the ladder.

Enter Google Alerts

With Google Alerts, we can put in search terms and Google will let us know when something new appears for that search. While this will sometimes just show new posts in the “blue chip” sites, very often you will get results in up-and-comers. Quite honestly new blogs tend to post more often than established ones, so we’ve generally found that we get a higher percentage of new than old.

I recommend going ahead and creating a Google account to manage your alerts if you don’t already have one. While you can receive alerts without having an account, they are easier to manage and remember if you have an account from which to manage them. Especially since there are so many uses for Google Alerts. You will eventually have so many it will be nice to have a list you can reference.