Blogging Tip: Stay Alert with Google and Yahoo News Alerts

Keep up with news and topics of interest quickly and easily with tools from Yahoo and Google. Both search engines offer a way to search news and current events, now you can tap these same resources with email alerts. Instead of performing searches on these sites, you can have news published in major media outlets sent directly to your inbox. Recently, Google added the option of keeping up with how these topics are being discussed in blogs as well. Although Google allows you to set up an alert without a free Google account, Yahoo requires that you have a Yahoo email address to set up or use their news alerts.

Following is an explanation of the features of the two alert systems as well as a brief description of how to set up an alert.

Google Alert Logo

Google News Alerts
www.google.com/alerts
Google news alerts are available for content from their News, Web, Groups, and Blogs content sections. The two sections that I use on a regular basis are the News and Blogs sections.

Setting up these alerts without an account is easy. If you search on a topic in the News section of Google, you’ll see a link at the bottom of the page inviting you to “Create an email alert”. Clicking on the link will take you to a page with a brief description of how the Google Alerts can be used and options of what Google content sections that you want to tap for your alerts as well as how often you want to receive these alerts. You can receive these alerts as it happens, a summary sent to you once a day, or summary sent to you once a week. After you have made a choice as to how often you want to receive these alerts, enter your email address, click on “Create Alert” and watch your email inbox for a message from Google. The message will be a message from Google asking that you confirm that you requested an email alert. Once you confirm the request, you can monitor topics from your inbox rather than through constantly performing searches on the Google new section. If you set up a free Google account, you can create new alerts without the confirmation process, change how often you receive alerts, and change the keywords for existing alerts.

One side benefit of these alerts is that you can discover new blogs that are covering the topics that you are writing about in your blog. Recently I added an alert for the term “copywriting” and have found a few blogs related to copywriting and marketing that I’ve bookmarked for regular reading.

You can create up to 1,000 alerts using Google.com. Google Alerts can be formatted to arrive in either HTML or plain text format.

Yahoo Alerts Logo
Yahoo News Alerts
http://beta.alerts.yahoo.com/

If you already have a Yahoo email address, check out the News Alerts offered by the other search engine. The concept of the Yahoo News Alerts is similar to the Google Alerts, when information hits the Yahoo news site that matches your alerts, you’ll receive an alert. While Google sends this information to your inbox, Yahoo adds the Yahoo Messenger and a mobile device to the ways you can receive the alerts.

Adding new alerts is a little more difficult than Google’s approach. Using the News area of Yahoo, search on the desired topic. In the right margin look for a link accompanied by an image of a gold bell with the text, “Alert me when articles match all these words:” followed by your chosen topic. Clicking on the link will take you to the Yahoo account log-in page if you’re not logged in already. Once you are logged in, you’ll be able to confirm that you want to create the alert. Delivery frequency options as well message formats (HTML or text) are shown only if you click on a link with the text, “Change Delivery Options” shown at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the button labeled, “Set Up Alerts” will add this to your alerts. Content used for the alerts come exclusively from the news section of the Yahoo, blogs are not included.

You can manage up to 100 alerts at the Yahoo News Alerts site.

Stay informed and monitor trends this year by using these easy to use online tools from Google and Yahoo.

About the writer: Mark Anderson has over 12 years in the sales and marketing field and has spent the last several years focusing on projects involving web design, email marketing, and graphic design. He’s part of the Creative Arts team at Evangelical Free Church of Naperville in Naperville IL. You can drop him a line at churchmarketing@yahoo.com.

January 2, 2007 · Filed Under Church Marketing

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Comments

4 Responses to “Blogging Tip: Stay Alert with Google and Yahoo News Alerts”

  1. John Smulo on January 2nd, 2007 2:55 pm

    I’ve been using Google alerts and have liked it a lot. But I hadn’t heard of the Yahoo service. Thanks for the heads up!

  2. Cory Miller on January 2nd, 2007 3:07 pm

    Me either! Thanks for the tip, Mark!

  3. Josh Carroll on January 3rd, 2007 9:46 am

    Your link to Google alerts needs an “http://” at the beginning to work correctly.

    Thanks for the blog!

  4. marka on January 3rd, 2007 10:42 am

    Josh,

    Thanks for reading the post and leaving the comment. I’ve fixed the link!

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