Quick Tip: Use Google Alerts for Content Ideas

You probably get more email messages than you want. In fact, you could probably live without most of them.

But there may be times when you actually want to attract messages. That’s because you want to save yourself the time required to research a topic.

Let’s say that you want to write five articles every day on your niche. After a few hundred, it can be quite a challenge. There are only so many ways that you can say the same thing.

Get a Steady Stream of Fresh Ideas Delivered to You

But suppose that someone gave you an opinion about something in your niche. Would you be able to offer a different opinion? Would you be able to spot an omission?

You see, receiving a message like that could save you a lot of time looking for something to write about just by provoking you to think about it differently.

You’ll be pleased to know that there is a free service online that will do this for you, and Google will give it to you.

It’s called a Google Alert, and it automatically delivers content to you based on words that you choose.

When you create a filter to keep spam out of your inbox, you identify messages that you don’t want because of words that are contained in them. But, when you create a Google Alert, then you identify words found in content that you do want.

Google sends message to your inbox, but the text is a list of search results with your keywords in them.

There is one limitation, and that is that the Alert only recognizes one word at a time.

How to Use Your Alerts

Let me give you an example:

Suppose that you want to receive links to content that used the keyword phrase fresh hot donuts. Because the Alert feature can only use one word, it will send you search results for the words fresh, hot, and donuts.

That means that some of your results will be for exactly what you want. But many of the results will be for topics that use just the word “fresh” or just the word “hot” or just the word “donuts.”

You could have fresh water or fresh flowers. You could get hot dog or hot climate. You could get hot donuts or stale ones. Using quotes, such as “fresh hot donuts” helps get the phrase you want.

You can have multiple alerts, so create alerts to monitor your brand and the keywords / niches you’re targeting.

Then create a filter or rule for Google Alerts and have them all go into a folder that you’ve created for the purpose. Now you have a ready resource of material the next time you want to create some content.