How to Use Google Alerts to Build Your Blog Content and Authority Points Even If You Are New to Your Blogging Niche!

The biggest difficulty most bloggers have is finding topics to write about. For the first few months you probably had tons of ideas that you wanted to share with the world.

But eventually that well runs dry and you could find yourself struggling to find new content ideas that are relevant to your niche or market and that your site visitors will find useful.

The good news is, you have the whole of the Internet (billions of pages indexed so far) to use as a research platform. But the bad news is, there's billions of pages and less than perfect search engine algorithms to sift through it all.

There are always new content ideas out there for you to use but the problem is actually finding them. Doing all this manually could take your hours upon hours each day and you might only find one or two items of interest.

Even watching news and RSS feeds is a hit-and-miss process - that item of pure gold could sail past while you're having lunch.

But there's a quick answer to this problem and that's Google Alerts . Using this free service can give you enough topics to keep your blog busy every day for the next few years. Not only that but it's a set-and-forget process; once you set it up it keeps doing what you told it to until you change some of the settings.

So how it works is like this. You go to Google.com/alerts. From there you can enter the search terms that are relevant to your niche or market and click on "Preview" - this shows you the type of news results you can expect to see. Then choose what type of content you want to receive a Google Alert on (news, blogs, real-time, video or discussion).

After that you set how often you want to receive the alerts (as-it-happens, once a day or once a week) and then choose the Volume of results (Only the best results or All) and then enter your e-mail address to receive the alerts. It's easier to manage all this from within your standard Gmail account so ideally use that if you can.

Now you just sit back and wait for the news stories to come into your inbox in real-time, once a day or once a week.

I've found that once a day is usually enough because I can pick and choose the news items I want and get to work on those. Once a week might work if your blog is in a really obscure niche though.

Now here's the really neat part! You now have content to work with. You can either use the alert to inspire you to research a topic and create your own content from that (no plagiarism - Google hates it) . Or you can paraphrase the content of the alert and link back to the original story so you're really just doing a quick rewrite on the content and showing your reader an external authority source for news.

Either way it's a win-win for you. You have an endless supply of content to work with every single day plus you gain authority points because every single time something relevant to your niche appears in the news you're covering it on your blog.

How cool is that?