How to keep up with your competition using Google Alerts

When you start off as a new blogger or if you are breaking into a new niche keeping up with your competition can sometimes be a bit of a pain in the butt to do. In order to follow others in your niche you have to find the other blogs using something like Google blog search, then start leaving comments to get your self noticed in that niche and drive traffic to your blog.

Here is a very easy way to keep up with your competition and save time doing it.

Instead of searching for other blogs related to your niche, create Google Alerts for it that emails you the second someone posts about what your niche pertains too. Creating a Google Alert is simple as heck to do. First you must go to the Google Alert site (visit it by clicking here) and then pick the keyword you want to follow, what type of alert you want to create and from what source it comes from, then enter your email address and your done. Google will send you out a conformation email, once confirmed, every time a post is made using that keyword you picked you get notified about it.

Here is an example of setting up a Google Alert.

By doing this you can start to get your self noticed as being an expert in that field by the relevant comments you leave on posts about your chosen niche your getting alerts for, or you can also drive traffic to your site being one of the people who are always the first to comment on blogs about that topic. There are a lot of benefits to creating a few Google Aerts and there is also no limit to how many you create.

When you go to leave a comment just don’t leave your name. You want people to see who you are and what your about before they even click on your name to visit your site. When leaving comments try using this method when filling out the comment form.

• Name – Collin – Monkeys
• Email – collin@monkeys.com
• URL – www.monkeys.com

This helps with branding as well. There is a added bonus to leaving comments this way too. A lot of blogs are still do follow which means when you leave a comment you get a link back to your site. By having your keywords along with your name you are going to be creating back links to your site using your keywords. This is really going to help you out with your page rank.

You can try this out now, by leaving a comment after this post using your anchor text along with your name. Get your self into my top commentators widget in my sidebar and you have a link back to your site using your anchor text. Cool Eh!

P.S.

You can also gain free back links to your site by submitting your posts to Link Adore