Sign Up for Google Reader and Alerts

Each person at the Boot Camp signed up for Google Reader and Google Alerts. We did this so each person could clearly and easily see how the things they posted on line were real and being reviewed or noticed by a variety of online services.

Google Reader is a way to organize your blog reading. Since everyone is going to be creating their own blog, setting up Reader will be a way they can see a service notice their blog posting right away. They will also go back and subscribe to the other blogs created in the class to see how tracking other blogs works, looks and feels.

To set up Google Reader you go to your Google Account. If Reader is not one of the options you already see, scroll down and click on more options. Select Reader from the options.

Click on Reader. Click on the "Add a subscription" button in the top left area. Cut and paste or type in the blog's web address - url.

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You have now added and account blog subscription. You can add as many as you want.

Add Alerts the same way. Once you have added Alerts to your account, click on the Alerts link and add any words or phrase. Be aware that common words or popular phrase may bury you in results. Setting an alert for the word "insurance" would probably send so many results as to not be useful. Enter the name of your agency, your name, your competitor's name will probably be very useful.