Create an “Alerts” Folder in Your RSS Reader

Back in October 2006 Google started a late round of PageRank updates. Most webmasters and bloggers were waiting eagerly for that to happen, and as soon as I saw some movement on online forums I wrote a blog post about it.
It was titled Google Changing the PageRank Algorithm?. It was one of the very first articles on the web covering the possible changes and penalties related to Google’s PR algorithm, and since the topic was hot, many people wrote about it afterwards, linking to my article.
What was the benefit of breaking that piece of news? Well, the post received over 300 comments and over 1000 backlinks (according to Yahoo!).
That little story was just an illustration of the huge exposure that you can get by being the first to write about something or to break a news.
Right, you might say, but how do I get access to scoops and breaking news before others do?
This is a tough question indeed, especially when you have newspapers and mainstream blogs competing with you for that coverage.
Ideally you should have insider contacts or people tipping you, but that is not a feasible route for most of us. So is there any other way to get news and announcements straight from the source?
Yes, they are called company blogs.
The majority of the Internet companies these days have an official company blog, where they share information about their products, services, and where they make announcements.
If you want to be among the first to access these announcements, you should just subscribe to the blog.
In order to streamline the process, you could create an “Alerts” folder in your RSS reader and put there all the feeds of the companies that are relevant to your niche. For example, if you blog about social bookmarking, you should create a folder with subscriptions to the blog of Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Mixx and so forth. This is a simple but very effective trick.