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Knowing what’s going on in your niche is a vital part of your online business. If you want visitors to keep coming back to your site, you will have to be the one with the latest news or latest events in your market. Now, with Google, this is even easier than ever before by already just making use of Google Alerts and Google reader.

Using Google reader to stay up to date
Google reader is an excellent feed reader which lets you have multiple feeds and even share them with other people. So in this article’s context, to stay up to date on your niche, I would recommend you to go out and look for a few blogs that is frequently updated and add those feeds to your Google reader. By doing this, and having a few resources that is frequently updated, you will have all the latest news in your market at a click away.

Using Google alerts to keep up to date on news
Google alerts is an excellent way of staying up to date on certain news and the current trends in your niche. It is vital to know what’s going on in your market as it provides you with new ideas for content or a reason just to send out an auto responder to your subscribers. By doing that will already make your subscribers have more trust in you as they would feel that you are an expert on the subject.

So how do you use Google alerts to do this? Pretty easy and it will take you less than a minute to set up. When you go to your Google account (and I presume that you have one) then you click on alerts. There you will be given the option to put in a keyword of your interest. I would recommend entering a phrase, rather that a keyword for more accurate results and then also put that in phrase match. So if you your market is blue widget (sorry for the cliché) then you would enter “blue widget” in your alerts. You can also set this to be only from blogs, news etc. and choose how frequently you’d like to be updated on this.

Now getting these alerts in your email every day or depending on your settings can be a bit irritating if you were me. So now Google made a new feature available and that is to implement this news to a feed so you will be able to read it in Google reader. Now, you can set multiple alerts on Google with different keywords and then see all of that in Google reader, just when you feel like it. You can even categorize them in folders.

If you haven’t made use of these services then NOW is the time to start doing this. It will take you less than 30 minutes to set up and will save you countless hours of research in the long run.