My Thirty Day Challenge Notes

Google has a free service that notifies you by email when it finds pages with your keywords. The keywords can be a topic or names or nicknames of people you want to follow on the web. This service allows you to track the distribution of your content and/or that of someone else.

Many of us have happened upon a unique personal identifier that we use for ourselves. For me, that identifier is “joubess”. Rob Somerville’s is “Gurubob”.

You sign up at www.google.com/alerts.

I also set up alerts for each of my niches so I can follow what’s going on in them. I’ll see how much email that generates. If too much, I’ll delete those alerts accordingly.

Once you’re notified of a new alert, you can follow the link in the email and social bookmark it accordingly.

The biggest thing it does is establish when Google finds your content and indexes it, allowing you to be alerted at that time. It allows you to follow the distribution of your content and leverage it or even increase the distribution further with pushes in organic growth areas.

It’s best to use a single email account specifically for this purpose so all your alerts will be in one place, and nothing else will be going into that account. I’m using one of my gmail accounts with filters that automatically sort posts into archive folders and all I have to do is go to those folders and browse the content on thoses phrase or names.