As many of you may have seen in my TAT video debut (see our new video here), when the camera was rolling I was working on my post for this week about Google Alerts.

I have used Google Alerts for a few years now. This little news snippets help me to stay on top of what is happening in an industry plus let’s me get to know the news makers and how I can better get connected.

Google Alerts is a free service from Google. You need to get yourself a Google account here . The advantages to a Google account is access to many of their free services, such as webmaster tools if you have your own site, analytics, special search pages just for books, plus a long list of rather neat gadgets for your use.

Right from the sign up page, Google alerts are email updates from Google to you and can be used for:

• monitoring a developing news story
• keeping current on a competitor or industry
• getting the latest on a celebrity or event
• keeping tabs on your favorite sports team

I enter in a particular phrase of my interest, say airbrush tattoo, and I choose that daily, I receive one email with all the previous day’s listings from the news and blog world that reference airbrush tattooing. On the day of the video shoot, I received this alert:

Port Pirate Festival
By Nigel and Marie~(Nigel and Marie~)
At the end of the week-end, every one got airbrush tattoos “img src=”http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v230/ma_lafranque/P6070117.jpg” I liked mine Xavier learned to be careful who he trusts to tattoo his back, hopefully he learned …
Roadtrip Adventures - http://nigelsade.blogspot.com/

If you follow the link, you learn of a pirate festival in Chicago where, if you look at the photos, many of the participants are covered in airbrush tattoos. Information such as this could go into you date planner for next year to be sure that your airbrush tattoo business is included in the festival. By this time next year, you will have an entire year’s worth of events for your business, all courtesy of free alerts from Google.