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Blog Food-Google Alerts Challenge

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This entry is part 1 of 2 in the series blog food

How many of you are using Google Alerts as a source of blog food?

Ok, I admit that sounds like a question I ask folks when I am doing blog training. But it is a critical question. Many of us are not tapping into this powerful, I mean powerful resource.

Ok, what is Google Alerts?

As defined by Wikipedia:

The Google Alerts is a content monitoring service, offered by the search engine company Google, that automatically notifies users when new content from news, web, blogs, video and/or discussion groups matches a set of search terms selected by the user and stored by the Google Alerts service. Notifications can be sent by email, as a web feed or displayed on the users iGoogle page.

Google Alerts only provides content from Google’s own search engine.

Currently there are six types of alerts sent when new content matches the search terms of the alert:

* Comprehensive – (default setting) aggregates News, Web and Blogs
* News – sent when matching content makes it into the top ten results of a Google News search

* Web – sent when new web pages appear in the top twenty results for a Google Web search

* Blogs – sent when matching content appears in the top ten results of a Google Blog Search
* Video – sent when matching content appears in the top ten results of a Google video search

* Groups – sent when matching content appears in the top fifty results of a Google Groups search

Users determine the frequency of checks for new results. Three options are available: “once a day”, “once a week”, or “as it happens”. These options set the maximum frequency of alerts and do not necessarily control how often they will receive alerts. Alerts are sent only if new content matches the user-selected search terms.

The first option, for example, means they will receive at most one alert email per day. The “as it happens” option can result in many alert emails per day, depending on the search.

Google Alerts are available in plain text as well as HTML. In October 2008 Google also made alerts available as RSS feeds.

MY CHALLENGE TO YOU

Develop a Google Alert for”

  • Topic Area of your blog
  • Your name
  • Blog Titles

Try doing a comprehensive notice everyday for a week. You can always edit it. Then blog every day and include the title of each blog post in your alerts.

Glean from some of the news listings and other blogs and add them to site as a blog post. Remember to provide all links included in that blog post and credit to the authors

Are you up for the challenge?

Please share some of your results.

PS Use an email address that can tolerate the traffic.

Blog Food-Feed Online News Articles to Your Hungry Blog

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This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series blog food

Online news articles from news sites are one of the best ways to get blog food for your blog. If you have a blog that focuses on opinions, politics or events you can do a search on that topic and glean the recent articles that appear. You can then make your own commentary and link to that particular site.

Also, while you are there sign up with the site. You can start with a very social media friendly site like CNN. As a of fact I just went over to their site and saw a fellow baby boomer blogger Inez Bracy.

She was under the section called “Friends Activity”. This is a section on CNN where using Facebook, you can  see what your friends are recommending and sharing on CNN. Inez was sharing an article post on CNN about the shorthand language used by teens when referring to drug and alcohol use.

So you can go and connect using your Facebook and allow CNN’s software  to grab your information. Now this entitles you to post a link to the video, blog, or make a comment on a blog post and get the link back to your site. There is also a section where you can grab the permalink on a particular blog post and reference it on your blog. That’s where YOUR blog is fed blog food from CNN.

Check out the pictures below showing the blog section of CNN and the place where you get the  permalink.


After you click on one of the blog posts you will see the permalink option. (Note: A permalink is a shortlink with the name and or date  of the post in the link. You use this link to post in your blog when referring to the post on the news site.)

using permalinks for referencing blog posts

After you click on the permalink the resulting url is below:

http://ricksanchez.blogs.cnn.com/2010/05/10/wanna-see-what-goes-on-behind-the-scenes-at-ricks-list/

Take that link and you could, for example write:

“Look at what goes on behind the scenes at Rick’s list” Highlight that entire statement and insert the link into the box.

So, get started now by looking for joining CNN and also search in the search engines for the news site for your state or local newspaper. Here are a few news sites to get you started.

NJ

The Seattle Times

Charlotte News

Go ahead just type in your State or major city into the search engine, i.e,  “Detroit news” and search around for a registration or sign up button. If the site is not social media savvy move on to the next one. Be sure to participate in the social bookmarking and social networking opportunities.

Was this helpful for you?

Trust me when I say that you will find an article related to your niche topic. Some sites will also have lots of blog posts. Try to find out how you can post your blog articles and link to the site. In addition you may have to go down to the bottom and look hard for it but there may be an option to post your videos!!!!!

Will this work for you?