If you have a new online business website that is struggling with getting traffic and making money, I’m going to show you how using Google Alerts can help fix that.
What is Google Alerts?
It’s a completely free tool from Google itself where you enter a general keyword for any major subject/s you’re interested in. Google will then send you “alerts” which are trending news topics on the said subject to your email. And you can select multiple alerts too.
How can you use Google Alerts to make money online?
There’s a few ways, but the general idea is that if you have a niche website on a particular topic and sign up to get alerts on that subject from Google, that they’ll send you trending news on the subject, which you’ll then be able to blog about and usually these subjects will have very little competition, but will also carry a lot of popularity.
This means that by blogging about trending subjects you get alerts from, you’ll be able to rank high on Google faster and get traffic from it to your website, from which you’ll then be able to do a number of things such as:
- Pitch affiliate marketing offers.
- Make money on the site from display ads like Mediavine.
- And even offer you own services.
This tool is great to use especially for people who are running new websites that aren’t yet ranking well.
Before you start using Google Alerts, there’s something you need to know:
There is a lot of value from using this program, but usually the trending topics it’ll give you will MAY run hot for a short while, then go cold, because news topics on many subjects come and go.
In order to get more consistent traffic to your website, I would strongly recommend doing 2 things:
1) The first things is blogging about evergreen niche subjects as they tend to have more long term popularity in how long they last.
2) And the second is knowing what to blog about using these 2 methods that I’ve personally used on every site I’ve made, and that works better in the long run, even though quick, high rankings take time to earn through this method. Still it’s the better one to use.
What I’m basically saying is, don’t get too caught up in using ONLY Google Alerts and it should mainly be used only for topics that have a longer span of running hot and just giving you content ideas (which is what it’s intended for), but for major growth to happen (traffic), the 2 methods I linked to above are far better for that.
The way I’d do it is this:
Use one of the 2 main methods I linked to above first.
When you hit a slump in that you can’t use either method to generate blogging ideas, rely on Google alerts then to fill in that gap, but then go back to the 2 main methods afterwards, you’ll want to primarily stick to those 2 because they provide more solid ideas for content that are evergreen.
Examples of how to use Google Alerts effectively:
It’s actually rather simple:
1) You’ll need to have gmail, then you’ll need to visit the official Google Alerts site for this service, and on it, enter keywords for the subject. I try to keep the keywords I list to no more than 1-3 per site, because believe me, you’re going to get a TON of emails, depending on the popularity of the keywords you enter.
For example, by entering “Diet”, I got an email within an minute with a bunch of ideas:
Now this screenshot only captured 4 ideas, but there was more in this email.
2) The next step is to filter the ideas you get to which best suite your site’s content base. If I have a site on dieting, the following ones would interest me most:
- Mediterranean diet.
- Military diet.
- Ketogenic diet.
3) I’d look up these 3 things on a keyword tool to see which gets most of the traffic data.
Note: Sometimes you won’t get any good data because the alert shows a new, trending topic, so keyword tools don’t have accurate data to show the real stats.
But either way, I’d still take a serious look at the topics you get in your inbox from this service. For instance, before I used this service, I used to look up news reports on weight loss topics, and ones that came up quite often were ones about celebrities losing weight.
I utilized those topics, wrote content on them and got ranked on the first page of Google in days, and while the topic died out, I still got a good traffic influx from it because I jumped on it early. And this short period of extra traffic was used to get more sales from affiliate marketing. It was short lived, but it worked and it also helped my site’s authority grow a little bit too.
4) Now another good option you can utilize is to be more accurate with the keyword you use in this service. This will likely provide you with less junk ideas to sift through and more so specific ideas you can truly use.
5) After getting ideas from it, write an article on it.
Where does the traffic come in from this?
As I mentioned above, should you jump on an idea on a trending topic, and write content on it, provided it’s new and there’s no keyword competition for it, you should expect your article to jump to the top page of Google quickly, and often this will happen regardless of how old your site is.
But Google Alerts occur for trending topics people are looking up, so having your site pop up early for those topics, WILL get you that search traffic.
And this is frankly because there’s literally little to 0 competition when a new topic arises that you write about. I’ve had it happen with the celebrity example numerous times. Marketers from my experience don’t really jump on these news events from my experience, so generally you can expect little competition.
Of course, you should also know that even with this program, you will also get ideas from topics that have been up for awhile and those will have competition.
In fact, the 3 diets I listed as an example above, already have a lot of competition for it, but in any case, even if that happens, if you don’t already have those topics being talked about on your site, this will still provide you with more ideas to work with to grow it.
My final thoughts:
I like this tool and it’s great to use, but it should not be considered a magic bullet for always finding high traffic content ideas. As I already mentioned, most of the ideas it’ll provide you with will be quick come and go topics or existing high competition topics, and while there’s nothing wrong with using some of them to write content on, like I said before, exhaust these 2 methods on what to blog about first, then use the other program to keep the content running.
And then eventually come back to the 2 methods like I said before. Always try and find the most popular topics you can write about that have low competition, that is where your efforts should be spent in creating high quality content.
Using the 2 methods and/or using this program will certainly help in that regard. Let me know your thoughts on this and if you’ve been able to get good traffic from this program or the other 2 methods 🙂