Today I want to talk about a tip that you don’t see discussed too often. That is the use of Google Alerts. If you’re building a blog or store front and working for a niche, Google Alerts can be a handy tool to help give you content to write about!

As we know content is very important to get that needed organic search traffic, but coming up with content is not the easiest thing to do at times, especially if you’re super busy. It’s hard to feel the pulse of a certain niche you’re working in, even if that niche is something that you’re very interested in, etc.

With Google Alerts, you can enter a keywords to be alerted on. Let’s still run with my ‘Star Wars’ theme as my paging example the other day. When you enter the phrase ‘Star Wars’ in Google Alerts, you can be notified by daily digest or ‘as-it-happens’ (I personally like to receive instant notification — so it can fuel my ADD througout the day). You can also select a type of web content to be alerted on. They are:

• News
• Blogs
• Web
• Comprehensive
• Video
• Groups

Now after you’ve selected your type you should be good to go (obviously you need Google Account set up). When Google runs across your term, you’ll be sent a email notification with a link or links to the site that has your alert term. This can be useful in a couple of ways. Number one, this can get you nice NEW info to blog about. And secondly, it can send you to blogs where you can comment on. Please don’t do stupid comment spam, but provide useful contribution to the topic and other comments, but you might be able to add a trackback or provide a URL back to your site for critical backlink development.

This tip is nothing new, but rarely see people talking about it for some reason. I’ve been using alerts for about 4 months, and seeing some good backlink development from it, but most importantly, it’s giving me ideas and directions for article writing on web stores and blogs.