No, It Can’t Be! Please say it isn’t so. My name on a Police Blotter!

Google News Alert is an interesting tool for online business and Internet Marketers in particular. You can use the Google News Alert, which is free like many other Google Tools, to monitor activity on keywords of your own, a competitor, keywords in a niche area or as some employers have started doing, monitor the names of staff members.

Another useful way to use Google News Alerts, according to my friend Jeff Mills, is to have your outsource team monitor certain keywords via Google Alerts to see what the competition is doing to get traffic to their websites and build your SEO work from those clues.

As you can see in my little example from above, it does take a little research to look at the data returned from Google Alerts to make sure it is valid. Griner is not as common as Larson or Peterson in most areas of the United States anyway, but further checking of the results is often needed.

By the way, that is not about me in this Google News Alert. It says, Cornelius W. Griner, 25, of North Pearl Street, was arrested Saturday on a failure to appear warrant… That is NOT ME! ;-)

Google provides Internet Marketers with lots of really cool tools and many are free. I use the Google Alerts to track when someone has linked a blog posting, article, video or other content of mine to a website. I also use it to track how fast the search engines list my content.

If you want to build a “real” Home Based Business using the Internet, you need to learn how to test and track what your are doing. Google News Alerts is just one tool out of many that you can use and it cost you nothing.

You should also look at purchasing a few other products or reference materials for your own education. There are many to pick from and some are better than others.

One that I’m looking into now as a reference is called Google Snatch 2. Apart from all the hype in the sales letter, it looks like a good tool to learn about how to drive traffic to my websites. I’m not endorsing this as I have yet to study it myself, I give it as one more example of how people are using Google and other tricks to get traffic to their websites.

I would like to get feedback on what tools you are using to test and track your websites and what the results are. Please post your reply in my comments area.