I recently posted about using Google Alerts to keep track of what others are saying about you or your site on the Internet.
Today, I want to show you how to use Google Alerts to spot hot trends on sites like EzineArticles.
For those of you that don’t know Ezine Articles is an article directory. To use the directory you write an original article and submit it. A human reviewer will review your article and if it meets their terms of service it will be approved and posted on the Ezine Articles website.
Many Internet Marketers use article marketing as part of their bag of tricks. You are allowed to add a resource box at the end of your article. So if you wanted to promote your site, you would type something like this in the resource box…
“If you enjoyed this article, click here for more information on xxxx”
You could then create links out of “click here” and “xxxx” and drive that traffic to your site.
Since Ezine Articles is so popular for marketers, it is a great place to find the latest trends on your niche.
Here is a Google Alert technique posted by Jack Duncan over at the Warrior Forum. It allows you to quickly be alerted to hot Ezine articles on your niche each month.
Step 1: First you will need to set up what you are searching for…or want to keep an eye on.
For instance if you wanted to keep an eye on “dog training” you would use the following
dog training site:ezinearticles.com “This article has been viewed 200..199999″ “Article Submitted On: * *, 2009″
The search string above will alert you when ever an article about “dog training” goes over 200 views that was submitted in 2009. We’ll want to modify this a little more below.
Step 2: In order to know a hot trend we’ll want to keep an eye on the current month. Let’s add the current month, which is October at the time of this writing.
Our new search string now looks like this…
dog training site:ezinearticles.com “This article has been viewed 200..199999″ “Article Submitted On: October *, 2009″
Step 3: Now we just need to set up a Google Alert using the code above
Log in to your Google Alerts
Start by modifying the code above. Just put your search term in the spot where “dog training” currently is. Paste the new code in to the “search terms field” of Google Alerts. Select how often you want to be alerted. That’s it!
Step 4: Relax while Google works on your behalf to alert you when articles in your niche start to see quite a bit of traffic.
On a quick side note, the search string above is a great way to find popular articles. It doesn’t have to be an alert.
For instance if I wanted to find all articles since July with more than 2,000 views I would head over to Google and paste this in to the search box.
site:ezinearticles.com “This article has been viewed 2000..199999″ “Article Submitted On: July *, 2009″
Enjoy!
