We make money using Google Alerts. What is Google Alerts? How to use and configure it
If you want to be aware of everything that is being said about your business online, then you probably use Google Alert s. This service makes it possible to monitor any mentions of a resource, company, media characters or keywords - and thereby control the image of your brand or product.
In this article, you will learn about 20 solutions that perform the same functions as Google Alerts. Some of them are free, while others require additional costs.
Each service is rated on a five-point scale, but which offer will be better for your business area is up to you to decide. Happy reading!
Free Google alternatives Alerts
First let's talk about free alternatives— below is a list of free services with brief description. It is worth noting that although compared to paid analogues, these resources may lack in variety of functions, but they do their main task well.
Yotify.com is a tool that allows you to track everything from events to products, announcements, discounts and RSS feeds. The user sets up so-called “scouts” (English scout - scout), which report the results of their search in the form of a daily report or hourly progress:
Peculiarities:
Track variables using a number of functions.
Monitoring price dynamics and product availability for sale.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Search service by keywords on the web and social networks.
Peculiarities:
With huge potential. However, you should learn how to use it correctly to solve various tasks. Today we will look at the operating principle of this device using examples.
Briefly about the possibilities
The Google.com Alerts service allows you to various actions, among them: prompt detection of plagiarism, monitoring backlinks, tracking social signals, searching for spam.
Why did Google have this tool?
The resource has gone far beyond the search engine. At the same time, most of the information about one’s own Google users collects from a proprietary browser, as well as the Android mobile OS. Essentially, we are dealing with the largest analytics company in the world. Google Alert is directly related to search. The robot of the system is not very selective. Thus, in search service everything that a special algorithm could recognize is included. The data then goes through the site evaluation stage. The tool we started talking about today will help you figure it all out.
Google Alerts: what is it and how to use it
In fact, before us is a search add-on that allows you to instantly track the occurrence of information of interest to the user throughout the Internet, or on a specific resource. The tool informs you about all the new products that enter the search engine index. Google Alert also allows you to use operators. Required for work account, uniform for all company services. For example, if you need to spend your vacation as economically as possible, notifications about the availability of hot tours are suitable. You can also use a number additional settings using the "More Options" function.
The “Sending frequency” item is responsible for the schedule for receiving letters with news from the system. It's not always convenient to receive notifications every time results appear. Well proven daily reports. The “Sources” option allows you to select the type of content from which you will search for information on the topic of interest. For example, the appearance of a new video, blog post or book on the desired topic.
If you need to track recordings only in YouTube, this can be done by adding a special Site operator to the entered request. “Language, Country” - select these parameters so that only those resources are tracked, information from which can be read without using dictionaries.
The Quality option allows you to ask the Google Alerts tool to send new information, obtained only from trusted resources or from all. “Delivery” - you can select the option to receive news on the desired topic. We are talking about the email address in the RSS feed. After completing the settings, click “Create Alert”. You can proceed to compiling the next request. In total, one account can have up to 1000 such applications. Buttons for editing and deleting advertisements are located from them right side. Thanks to the service, developers of virtual resources can receive information about new links on the Internet that lead to their sites. You can also track mentions of your own project on social networking pages.
Not many of you know that Google has such an interesting service as Google Alerts. Today, with its help, we can very quickly promote our favorite blog. Let's go...
Google Alerts - a goldmine for bloggers
Greetings, my dear readers. Today I’ll tell you a little about how you can quickly promote your portal, or rather blog, with the help of a good service Google Alerts. Let's figure out how you can quickly promote a portal and start earning money. I’ll try to go through the steps from the birth of an idea to monetization. Let's go!
1. Find the right area
Our main goal is to push the goods. To do this, look for the areas of activity that interest you most, where you can sell any product. Here you can buy cars, pills, intimate goods, books and so on. Today, you can push any product on the Internet, as long as as many beautiful words as possible are written about it, excellent reviews and colorful images. I would advise taking the spheres with the largest selection. To me, it's like diet pills or something like that. But everything is at your discretion. By the way, I would recommend selecting products using the same advertising exchanges, like admitad.com, gameleads.ru and other platforms.
2. Create a preview blog ( blog reviewer, observation deck)
Choose beautiful things domain name under the type of product. If these are books, then there must be a word book and so on in the same style. For Runet we take .ru, and for a foreign visitor - .com. Everything is natural and simple.
Use a regular CMS ( Joomla or Wordpress), create 10-20 pages with a focus on reviewing a product. Try to make each page a landing page. I wrote about this in this article - We create and promote a landing page in a few weeks. The design and how well the review is written is very influential here. You can try to write a review from some non-existent company ( oh how bad it is to deceive users, don’t tell anyone that it’s me who teaches you this). The review should have graphs, a bunch of fancy words and a table of various Before - After indicators, or something like that. People are incredibly influenced by all these designer fluff, beautiful words about a long life, a sculpted torso, or utter wealth.
3. Configure Google Alerts according to the specified criteria:
- By the name of the selected product, item. Each individual product needs to be considered. I would advise starting with 20-30 pieces.
- Niche in question.
- Competitors' products.
- Some third party products that are relevant enough.
4. Constant monitoring
Every day go to Alerts and check new messages and messages. The speed of response to messages will determine how quickly you can attract an audience to your website.
If the niche is popular, there may be 100 or more messages per day. This is very good on the one hand, but also bad on the other ( healthy competition). If there are too few alerts, then you need to add a couple more products, or return to the first point and rethink the scope of your portal.
5. Visit every URL yourself
As soon as you receive a new event, immediately go to the page and comment on it. try to be the very first commentator in order to get as many visitors as possible to your landing page. The text of the comment is the main part that should stimulate the transition as ordinary person, and force the moderator not to delete the comment. Don't just write Visit my site XXX. Better something like this - I constantly visit the XXX site before I buy this product. I hope that the idea will be understood by you. write as detailed as possible, put in a little soul and inspiration.
With the proper approach, each such answer will attract several target users per day. This is a one-time effect. Over time, mid and low frequency requests will rise due to the received reference mass, which will lead to natural search traffic.
Here is such a wonderful notification tool from Google. With its help, I found several mentions of my site, it was interesting to read, sometimes comment or thank the blog author for the link to my site.
By the way, with the help of “Alerts” you can track any events in politics, cinema, theater, travel and so on. For example, I chose my blog, website or company in order to monitor opinions about it, how they treat it, what they write and say. If you don’t have your own website, you can follow a new camera, a new iPhone, or news about the Ebola virus or Mars exploration, if anyone is interested.
The notification service will collect all the material and send it to you, and you can draw conclusions about the benefits of this service and change the settings if necessary.
Tracking links using xtool
Enough long time I use free service, which helps track many of my site's metrics. In particular, these are new links to my site that appear on the Internet.
To analyze external links, go to the Xtool service and register. Next we go to home page service and enter the url - the address of your website:
After the analysis is completed (a few seconds), you will be provided with the results.
To view external links (including non-indexed ones!) you need to go to the bottom of the page and go to the “Backlinks” tab
All you have to do is look at the address of the page from which they are linking to you, copy it, paste it into your browser and read flattering reviews about yourself or get a bucket of dirt. It depends on the usefulness of your resource or on the machinations of competitors))
It is no secret that sometimes competitors use not entirely fair rules of the game, be prepared for this too.
Alternatively, you can carry out the same manipulations on the Megaindex.ru website, the capabilities of which I wrote in detail here:
You will need to enter the url of your site, then go to the “Seo Services” tab and select the “External Links” subsection. Next, you can examine the links to your site.
Tracking new links using Yandex and Google webmaster accounts
This method is known to most webmasters, isn’t it, dear ones?
Of course, almost everyone knows him)) To do this, go to your Google and Yandex webmaster accounts and go to
to the tab " External links to the site pages":
Also in the Google webmaster panel:
For the Google toolbar only, be sure to click the “Advanced” button (I highlighted it in the screenshot above). When I just started blogging, I saw only 4-5 links and that’s it, but I saw the “additional” button only a month later and was happy like a child that there were not 4, but 100 links))
With these simple tools you can find outgoing links to the pages of your site and track all discussions on the topic you are interested in using Google Alerts. I'm sure this will be useful to you, use it. If there are other services or ways to do this, please share in the comments, I will be grateful.
See you!
Interesting notes
Greetings! I would like to introduce you to one of Google services, which many people have heard of, but the possibilities of its application often remain underestimated. We are talking about easy to use, but at the same time quite powerful Google tool Alerts or Google Notified and I. Proper Use this application will not only help you keep abreast of events that interest you, but can also become effective assistant to your business.
So, Google Alerts: what is it, how does it work, who can be useful and how to make working with it as productive as possible? All this is discussed in today’s article. We will also find out whether Google Alerts has analogues, but first things first.
How Google Alerts works: overview of functionality
Google Alerts is an online alert service from the search engine of the same name, which invites its users to “keep an eye on everything new and interesting” for them on the Internet. By the way, the application is completely free. To use it, just go to https://www.google.ru/alerts and log in. To do this you will need a Google account. If you don't have one yet, just register email in Gmail and it will be created automatically.
With the help of Google Alerts, we can instantly receive information that appears on the network for the request we need, which has been indexed by Google. Unlike Yandex, the Google search bot collects and sends all content for indexing without resorting to any filtering. Consequently, the options offered to us by the Alerts service in response to given condition searches may be very numerous and not the most “selected” in the context of relevance. But the quality of the list of web resources received can be controlled. As well as many other functions. I suggest you learn how to set up Google Alerts in order to get the necessary return from the service.
The application interface is concise and understandable. The first thing we see is the “Create alert” line, where you need to enter a request. Below is your online data: account and email. Next to each of them there is a plus sign, by clicking on which this data will be issued as a request.
Let's assume that we are learning the Bootstrap framework on our own. We want to receive information about emerging lessons on the Internet, webinars, videos, and discussions on forums. We enter our request “Bootstrap lessons” in the appropriate field. The “Create alert” and “More options” buttons appear immediately below the line. Below them, in the “Preview” block, are previously found results that might be suitable. This is a kind of example of the format in which we will receive a report on search results.
Let's take a closer look at what's behind the options button.
When clicked, a drop-down list opens with a list of customizable Google Alerts functionality:
- Sending frequency. This item provides 3 options: “As results appear”, “No more often than once a day”, “No more often than once a week”. Select the optimal frequency for receiving reports, depending on the purpose you are pursuing when creating specific request. If you expect an immediate response to the information received or it is important for you to “catch” the expected event in real time, choose the first option. Examples of such cases, as well as recommendations on how to use Google Alerts, will be given below. Be careful if the request is high in frequency, there is a risk of being inundated a huge amount messages.
If your request is more general plan and a summary for a certain period of time is enough for you; daily or even weekly alerts will be more convenient. In this case, you will receive messages with information that has appeared on the Internet in the last 24 hours or 7 days, respectively.
- Sources. Here the service provides us with the opportunity to detail the area of information search, thereby specifying the type of content. You can only track what's new in blog posts, or in video format, or in comments. Full list available options looks like this: auto-select, news, blogs, internet, video, books, discussions, finance.
- Language, country. We establish which state the web resources that post the data we need should belong to, and in what language we want to see the publications. It is logical that if you want to receive information on some issue from Tunisian news sites, there is hardly any point in choosing the Russian language. I note that the choice of both languages and countries is quite large.
- Quantity. This item designed to manage the quality of content provided by Google Alerts, and as a result, the quantity. There are 2 options available: “All results” and “Only best results" The first name speaks for itself. If you want alerts to contain only information from “reliable” sources selected according to criteria Google quality, you should give preference to the second option. In this case, your search results will probably not include mentions from small, non-indexed Internet resources.
- Delivery. You can receive alerts either to your email.gmail or in RSS feed format. Please note, specify arbitrary mailbox you have no right. The application automatically assigns the email with which you logged in to Google.
While working with the settings, examples of notifications from “ Preview» will change depending on the options you select.
Having set the necessary parameters, click “Create alert”. Now we can manage our alerts in the “My Alerts” block. Opposite each of our requests there are 2 buttons: for editing (pencil icon) and for deleting (trash icon). In addition, we can configure the receipt of reports itself, or more precisely: the time of their delivery and the summary format (i.e., when all alerts are sent in one email). To do this, click on the gear icon next to the name “My Alerts”.
Perhaps this is all we need to know about how to set up Google Alerts.
The service allows you to create up to 1000 requests. Let's find out when Google Alerts can come in handy and how to use this tool to utilize its full potential constructively.
Using Google Alerts in practice
Let's start with what it was originally invented for. this service. If you are interested in any issue or have a hobby, then you probably know how much time it takes to monitor information on the right topic. With Google Alerts, you only need to create a request once, and you can regularly receive the latest data and keep your finger on the pulse of what's happening. This saves your time.
Google Alerts can be an indispensable assistant in tracking last-minute tours, discounts, sales, promotions, promo codes - all types of offers that are valid only for a limited period of time or have a limited quantity. Just select the sending frequency “As results arrive” in the settings.
You can even use the capabilities of the Alerts service to search for a job. For example, let’s create a request “Moscow seo vacancy”.
Now you will have access to the most up-to-date information on this issue on the Internet.
If you want to narrow your search to a specific source, detail the alert: Vedic recipes site:youtube.com, where after “site” you can insert the name of the site you are interested in.
Here, I think, everything is clear. Now let's look at how this Google Alerts functionality can be used in business and promotion.
Using queries, you can track all mentions on the Internet related to your name/brand/organization/project. Why is this necessary?
- For reputation management. Let's imagine a situation: your business achieves some success and competitors begin to make attempts to ruin your reputation. In the context of our example, we are talking about a number of negative publications about your company that they posted on the RuNet. Articles are well optimized and appear in the TOP search results by the name of your organization. Thanks to Google Alerts, you will be able to see this in time, and the situation can be taken under control. You will have time to take measures to ensure that your name does not suffer: publish a series of your articles and promote them in such a way that they displace negative links from competitors from the first pages in search engines.
It is also possible that an online store confuses the address and delivers incorrectly. Dissatisfied customer posts negative review on a specialized website or forum. I think it’s obvious to everyone how important it is in such a situation to react quickly and write a meaningful response.
- If you are a blogger, then having learned that the name of your project was mentioned on some web resource, you have the opportunity to negotiate with the webmaster to place a link to your site. Since the author has already talked about you, most likely he is loyal to your project and will not refuse.
- If you are an information businessman, then Google Alerts gives you the opportunity to monitor the illegal distribution of information products on file hosting services and torrents. Also, when discussions that are relevant to you appear on the forums, you will be able to promptly join the discussion, answer a question about the product, or provide clarification.
The service can be used to monitor competitors. Create a query based on their titles or names. If you see a negative review about their activities online, take the opportunity and make the user a more profitable and high-quality offer.
Use Google Alerts to set up notifications about mentions of your project on social networks. Perhaps you are promoting on social networks, then you need to insure yourself against such unpleasant moments as, for example, a negative mention by a famous blogger. Or, by analyzing social signals, you can get an idea of what content is more preferable to target audience. For this purpose, create an alert in the following format:
website (site:facebook.com OR site:twitter.com OR site:plus.google.com OR site:vk.com),
where in curly braces indicate your preferred social networks, separating them with the logical operator “or” (“OR”). Here and further in the examples, the name of my blog should be replaced with yours.
To promote an Internet project, it will certainly be useful to follow the placement on third party resources new backlinks to your site. Of course, the role of backlinks is important to increase the trust of a blog and its thematic index citations. But low-quality sources of link mass can damage the ranking of your web resource and lead to you falling under search engine filters. Therefore, it is so important to neutralize in a timely manner if the pages from which they come do not fall under.
To create this type of alert from Google Alerts, enter the following type of construction into the search bar:
https://site/ -site:site,
where the expression “- site:site” will exclude new pages of your own resource from being included in the results.
In several cases, it may be useful to select a blog as a source of information on the desired topic when setting up an alert. Monitoring new publications has undeniable advantages:
- this is a stable source up-to-date information and new topics for your own articles;
- these are potential sites for placing backlinks;
- this is an opportunity to be the first to write a comment with an indexed link on a dofollow blog (a blog where for indexing search robots Links left when commenting are open).
Google Alerts can help you additional tool against spam:
poker OR casino OR porn OR sex OR pharmacy site:site,
where you need to list stop words that characterize spam. Typically, webmasters form their list empirically.
Another non-trivial way Google applications Alerts are searching and attracting new clients. Let's say you are the owner of a pet store in Irkutsk. Then a number of alerts will suit you, such as: “buy a collar * Irkutsk”, “Irkutsk buy a collar”, “* collar * Irkutsk”, etc. When will you see that potential client is looking for a product related to your field of activity, you can quickly respond: give recommendations as an expert, answer the question and add a link to your resource.
Have you ever come across an interesting web resource that does not provide the opportunity to subscribe to its newsletter? Create a request:
site:klassniysite.ru –
and you will always know about new publications.
If you are not too lazy, you can even turn Google Alerts into an anti-plagiarism tool. It is enough to generate an alert from a unique line of your article. Of course, this is a very time-consuming option if your blog posts regularly large number material, but perhaps it will come in handy.
Here are the main ways to use the Google Alerts app. But you can come up with your own new options for using the service and share them in the comments!
How to generate alerts: operators
The more precise the request, the more specific its wording, the more useful it will be for you. incoming notifications from Google Alerts. As you have already noticed from the examples given in the article, special operators can help us achieve maximum effect in searching for information:
- “” “” (quotes) - a search for an expression enclosed in quotes will be carried out in strict compliance with the sequence of words and exact match word forms;
- “+” (plus) is a sign placed before a word, without a space (this is prerequisite), denotes a command to search for a word in its original form, i.e. repeats the function of quotes;
- “-” (minus) – indicates that the word it precedes should be excluded from the search. For example: “online store zoomir-tula”. What does it mean: mentions of this store in connection with the city of Tula will not be included in the selection results;
- “site” - allows you to narrow the search for information to a specific site or domain zone: “Silver Age of Poetry site:poesy.com” or “Silver Age of Poetry site:.ru”;
- "OR" ( logical operator OR) – registered in capital letters as a separator between listed words, forms a search condition for any of the options. Without using “OR”, only those mentions will be selected that involve all of the spelled words at the same time.
- “*” (asterisk) – replacement of a word in the notification.
Services like Google Alerts
Many, faced with the application we are talking about today, want to find out if Google Alerts has analogues in Yandex. Unfortunately, the most popular search engine Runet can only offer us a service vaguely reminiscent of Google Alerts. This is Yandex. Blogs located at yandex.ru/blogs. This tool can help you track brand mentions in social media. The principle of operation is very simple - enter a query into the search bar and get links.
In addition to this application, of course, there are a large number of paid and shareware services for collecting data on mentions in the media, blogs, and social networks. They are distinguished by a more flexible system of settings, the function of exporting search results to various formats, the ability to analyze and evaluate the information received. Similar programs include: IQBazz, Kribrum, Wobot, YouScan, TalkWalker, BrandsEye, Babkee. The listed applications have user-friendly interface, technical support service, provide expert advice. They have every reason to become useful tool in effective reputation management and marketing research.
If you need deeper monitoring of the popularity of your project and want to get an analysis of all kinds of Internet resources around the world, use Google Alerts analogues such as Mention or ContentGems.
Functionality of the English-language MOZ service Open Site Explorer is useful if you want to analyze the web resources that link to your site. The service will display the page link, anchor text and donor spam. Various filters will help you generate the most useful report on the results.
As you can see, Google Alerts is not inferior to its analogues in terms of functionality, even though they are paid. Therefore, the Alerts service can definitely be recommended as great tool For operational tracking on the web for up-to-date information on an issue of interest, for SEO optimization and project promotion, for brand reputation management and no-budget marketing.
And here is a video for a visual introduction to Google Alerts: