Google Alerts: A Tool
to Spread the Mission

By Noor

As I explained in an article for a much earlier Newsbrief, one of the advantages to using the Internet to spread the Mission is that the things you post and create have a very long life, often remaining where you put them for years for new seekers to find. Therefore, I recommended to try to put a piece of the Mission in as many spots as possible all over the web, so more and more people can stumble upon them and become interested.

However, it is also true that not all parts of the Internet are equal - there are many pages, blogs, etc. that few or no one will ever access again. The world wide web is an enormous place, and a lot can fall through the cracks. Therefore, especially because we are still so small at this time, it is important to focus our efforts to create the largest and most widespread impact. For online outreach, this means trying to figure out what the best places would be to spend our time posting and linking to the Mission website.

To help me decide where the most effective places to post would be, I have recently begun using a service called Google Alerts. This service allows you to take advantage of the fact that Google is constantly searching the web for new websites and pages to add to its search engine. By setting up a Google Alert for a certain word, term, or phrase, you can have an email sent to you whenever Google finds that term in a new place on the Internet!

Therefore: I have set up a Google Alert for the word "Maitreya." Once a day, I receive an email with links to all the new places Google has found the word "Maitreya" - from blogs, to news sites, to Buddhist forums, to channeling and New Age discussion groups (one thing that Google Alerts seems to exclude is social networking sites like Facebook, possibly because there are far too many updates per day to track usefully). Then, I can post a brief message on each of these places proclaiming that the Maitreya is here and giving a link to the website.

This way, rather than randomly posting all over the web, I am posting specifically in areas where the name Maitreya is already being discussed, so it is more likely that viewers will be interested in the Mission and what we have to offer. Also, these areas have just been created or updated (which is why Google has only now found them), meaning they are fresh and likely being viewed by people, not lost in a dead part of the Internet never to be seen again.

With this method, I feel that the 15-20 minutes a day I spend posting is much more directed, focused, and effective than the much greater amount of time I was spending before trying to find good places to put something!

I am only tracking the word "Maitreya" - however, there are many other words that could be used to similar effect (Messiah, end times, Mehdi, return of Christ, Kalki Avatar, unification of religions, Seventh Angel, Seven Seals, etc.). Therefore, if you also see the potential in the Google Alerts tool, I would encourage you to create alerts for one or a few of these terms. If each of us takes on a few, we can together get information about Maitreya and the Mission to all the places on the web where people are seeking - seeking for the Messiah, seeking for the Truth, seeking for what we have to offer.

Those are the people we are trying to reach. They are most likely to be the Elects. So let us direct our efforts to find them first, and quickly!

Note: If you have questions or would like more information on how to use Google Alerts, you are welcome to contact me.