Content Generation Idea: Using Google Alerts

Content Generation Idea: Using Google Alerts

I'm surprised I've not covered this before on using Google Alerts for content generation ideas as it's one of the best free tools that Google provide that is absolutely perfect for using for coming up with an almost endless amount of content generation ideas! I myself and many people use Google Alerts on a daily basis to get to find out about what's new for certain keywords that I and others are targeting or want to know more about. And all you have to do is just set up a quick and simple alert and Google will email these to you as and when it find something related to that keyword online on a site it has crawled. And that will be the thesis of this discussion today!

Content Generation Idea: Using Google Alerts

So Google Alerts (google.com/alerts) is a free Google tool you can use to get email notifications (Alerts) on just about everything and anything you can think of! But let's say for example, you wanted to be alerted about any new topics that Google finds related to freelancing. We'll all you would need to do is just set up an alert with that keyword as the main keyword. And after setting some basic filters like what you want it to search and the result you want it to return. Of which I'll explain in more detail below. Well once that's done, Google will send you email notifications about anything it has recently found that contains those keywords. That could be blog posts, forum threads and a lot more! But this is a very helpful free tool you can use for content generation ideas. How? Well by being alerted about new things people are posting on your niche you can use these for ideas and inspiration!

Setting up Google Alerts the Right Way

As you can see when you head on over to the Google Alerts setup page, you can set the filters of what you want it to find and what kind of results you want it to return. You can go ahead and choose the default settings but it's best to twiddle a little and here's the best thing to choose for setting up yours.

• For "How Often" it's best to choose "At most once a day" instead of "As-it-happens" else Google will send you tons of individual emails. 
  
• For "Sources" it's best to just stick with "Automatic" but you can have it return only results from News sites, Blogs, the Web, Videos, Books or even Discussions (forums basically)
  
• For "Language" you would want to choose English unless you're working in another language.
  
• For "Region" it's best to choose "Any Region" which is basically the country you're in.
  
• For "How Many" it's best to choose "Only the best results".

As you can see from the above screenshot, you'll also need to set an email address to have the alerts sent to. You can just choose your main email address if you want unless you want them sent to a specific email address just for this. And that might be wise considering that in time, Google can send you a lot of these!

Tip: If you're using a Gmail email account, set up a label within it so that they all go into that only.

Another tip is, once you've set up the alert, click on the little cog icon and from here you'll be able to set a couple more options such as the time of day that Google sends the alerts to you. You can also set whether to receive the alerts as a digest or not. I recommend choosing this as that way everything will be sent in one digested email which is a lot better for more control.


And that's basically all there is to it! From now on, Google will send you alerts to your inbox. When they arrive, they will look not unlike this..

Now you can just check them out, see what they're saying, and use them for content generation ideas and inspiration!

More than this, Google Alerts also provides you with a great way to build backlinks from related sources. By just checking out the blogs and forums and things that Google shows you, you can then possibly go in, leave a comment and drop your link.

But that's just another way in how using Google Alerts can be beneficial to you. 

Do you use Google Alerts for these reasons?