Google Alerts - Keeping Up To Date

Do you use Google Alerts? This is a handy, free tool from Google. I use it on my username - lou16. It's handy to see if anyone blogs about you or links to any of your sites. I've found blogs that I think are interesting and they have linked to one of my lenses so I've tweeted them. I used to digg or stumble articles that linked to me (provided they were good and not cut and paste with a link that is), but as I don't really digg or stumble any more they just get either tweeted or a reciprocal link from one of my articles, lenses or hubs.

You can also use Google Alerts if you have a niche and use the alert for your primary keyword.

The Google Alert I mainly use though is my lou16 one and it was interesting to see which directories showed up first when I submitted a lens in my experiment last week - squidom showed up on an alert within hours!

How Do I Set Up A Google Alert?

It couldn't be easier, first go to Google Alerts
Next add your search terms and I leave it on everything, but you can choose to just be notified about blogs, news, videos etc. Decide how long you want your email to be and enter your email address.
Now you just wait for the alerts to appear in your mailbox.

On a personal note I'm back overseas next weekend, I'm hoping to have time to still post to this blog, but if I don't respond to questions it's just because I'm not at home and I will get back to you when I can.