Use Google Alerts to Stay on Top of Your Art Niche

If you are not familiar with, or have not used Google Alerts to monitor your art niche, this article can be a very important new tool for you to use on a regular basis. Google Alerts will help you monitor very specific sections and segments in your area of expertise or it can be a great research tool for areas and subjects that you would like to be involved with in the future.

Google Alerts will monitor all, or separately the following areas of the internet; news, blogs, video and discussion groups and/or there is an “everything” tab which includes all of them. The alert is based on your query, term or subject and the results can be provided to you as it happens, once a day or once a week. The alerts can be received in an email or in an RSS Feed. To benefit from this, you need to have a Google account, it is free.

Here are a few things that you can do with Google Alerts to help push your art career to the next level:

1. Content Monitoring

Google Alerts provides an artist with a way in which they can monitor their article content once it has been published on the internet. This monitoring can be employed in order to see if anyone is using their article content elsewhere. Possibly it is being used somewhere else on the internet and the artist is not being given the proper credit for the article or the links back to the artist have been disabled in this content.

The way in which this is done is to put into the alert section a sentence of the article and Google will match that sentence or parts of that sentence and provide the link to you. Google Alerts provides an excellent way in which to oversee and monitor the artist’s written works.

2. Reputation Management

By placing your name or company name, and even with misspellings, the artist is able to monitor what is known as “reputation management”. This would provide to the artist alerts whenever that name showed up or was used on the internet (good and bad). If something was being said about the artist in any group or forum, then the artist could

take the appropriate steps to combat this because of this alert. Google Alerts are almost “real time”, depending on how this feature is set in terms of notifications

3. Find out Who Is Linking to Your Website & Blog

By placing your domain name in Google Alerts query (example: www.yoursitename.com) anytime someone were to link their site to your wesbite you would receive an alert. Why have they done this? Find out, do some research, as they may have clients/customers that you would also like to have too. It is time to find out what everyone is doing out there, don’t you think?

4. Key Word for Research in your Niche

With Google Alerts the artist can monitor several key words that are used for and about their art or for their art business. The key word alerts will provide to the artist interesting links to what other artists and related professionals are doing. In addition, the alerts will also provide the artist with ideas and hints for other key words, subjects and related topics that could enhance the marketing and selling of their art too as well.

5. Monitor Art News and Opportunities in your Niche

As an artist who specializes in a specific art form and who is looking for opportunities, Google Alerts is a great tool to use. Assume you are a photographer and you are looking for art galleries and photography competitions where your photography may fit. For example, the artist could set up Google Alerts for “photography art galleries”, “photography competitions”, “photography exhibitions”, or “photography gallery opportunities”. These search terms and phrases can all be further refined to geographic areas if required.

An artist, depending on what they are after, will need to try different terms and experiment with different phrases and queries in order to make this process effective. This process is no different than an artist refining keys words for a website or for a PPC campaign. See what works or does not work and further refine as you go along.

6. Target Key Words to Find Customers

I have a friend who has always been interested in art for hospitals, art therapy, healing art and evidence based art. She set up several Google Alerts for art in hospitals and for art therapy programs. Every day she receives alerts that provides to her ideas, information, news and opportunities in her specialty of hospital art.

What is your area of interest in art? Where are your opportunities to sell your art? Where are your prospects and potential customers? Try Google Alerts to beat your competition, discover new opportunities and to find trends in your art niche.

Stay ahead of the curve in your art niche by using Google Alerts.

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Art Marketing Strategies provides to new and emerging artists who want to sell more art with the vision, roadmap, tools and support to market their art successfully in today’s competitive marketplace.

John R. Math is also the owner of Light Space & Time - Online Art Gallery and John R. Math Photography.

He can be reached by tel. 888-490-3530 or jmath@artmarketinstrategy.com