The Pro Shop

Using Google Alerts to stay in the know

CustomMade Staff, contributor

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Have you ever seen a woodworker friend sharing an article via email or any one of a number of social media sites and thought to yourself “how in the world did he find that article?” How do you find articles and woodworking news? (Aside from FineWoodworking.com of course! )

 Truth be told, without some of the more recent online tools, one would be left to their own devices to sift through unthinkable amounts of information if they wanted to find that small town newspaper article about a woodworker making unusual furniture, or whatever the story may be.  I’m going to walk you through using (yet another) Google tool to keep you in the know and present you with information about any topics on which you need to be informed.

This process is actually quite a bit easier than the Google analytics tutorial I shared with you a few days ago. If you don’t have a Gmail account, you’ll need to create one here. After you have your gmail account, visit the Google alerts page here.  Enter in your terms here, and the trick is to keep it simple. Rather than selecting  a term like “woodworkers and furniture makers” , keep it to something like “woodwork”. If you need more coverage, you can create a separate alert and they will both be sent to your email. Avoid unneeded suffixes and plural words.  Next, select where you want Google alerts to scour for information using the drop down labeled “Type”.  After selecting how often and how relevant the alerts need to be, select your Gmail account and click “Create Alert”.

When you have created an alert, you will be taken to this edit screen.

This means your alert is set up correctly. When you receive your alerts in your inbox, they will look something like this:

All that’s left now is to find the articles you like, and share them with your friends! Make sure if you are using text from these articles in your website or blog that you contact the author for permission before hand and refer back to the original article. Of course, it never hurts to have a network of friends who share these things anyways, have you come across anything remarkably interesting lately?? Tell us about it!

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Comments (1)

GEide writes: We use this all the time here at FW. If you follow us on Twitter (http://twitter.com/fwmagazine) it's where I get the scoop on the newsy woodworking links I post. Any of you out there use it to stay on top of the online news on you and your business?
Posted: 11:10 am on October 25th

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