Scholarship Search Secrets
Find FREE Money for College
Make optimal use of Internet technologies to find scholarships.
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Scholarship Alerts
We will assume from the previous steps that you've now got a list, a solid list, of about 25 - 30 scholarship searches which return results that are relevant to your personal details. Maybe by this point you've even started to apply for some of the awards you've found. However, it can't be said enough: scholarship search is a year-round sport. You can't afford to take time off from your search if you want to maximize your chances of earning free money for college.
What if there was a tool that could search for you everyday, every minute, keeping an eye on everything, and alerting you when new scholarships based on your needs became available? Wouldn't that be an incredibly powerful asset to help you in your quest?
There is such a tool. And believe it or not, it's free, too. It's called Google Alerts, and they're about to become your next best friend. Head over to www.Google.com/alerts and grab your list of searches from the previous steps handy. Start entering them into the interface, adding an alert for each search, as shown in the box to the right.
What you'll get in your email inbox every day is a list of Web pages, news items, and other digital notes from around the Web that Google has found which match your search terms. If Google can't find anything, it won't send you an email that day.
One recommendation - use your most specific, narrow searches with this service, the ones that returned only a few results. If your search is too broad, you'll end up with gigantic emails every day that will take forever to read.
Read All About It
Email isn't the only way to get scholarship information delivered to you every day. Imagine for a moment that there was a scholarships column in every newspaper in America. It would take you forever to clip out that column from each paper and put them all in a scrapbook, not to mention the tremendous expense of buying all those papers each day. That's kind of what it's like to try keeping up with all the news and blogs about scholarships all over the Web.
Happily, services like Google Reader do all the clipping and scrapbooking for you, delivering them in one easy to read window, like your own personal newspaper delivered daily, for free. If you've gotten this far into the book, you've already got a Google Reader account set up. Here's how to start "digitally scrapbooking" scholarship information.
Go to Google News (http://news.google.com) and enter one of your scholarship searches there. Scroll down to the bottom of the page, and you'll find a series of links, including one for Google Reader. Click on it.
You'll be asked in Google Reader if you want to subscribe to that news feed. Click the subscribe button.
Once subscribed, every time there's a news story about that scholarship term, you'll get articles about it that you can read, review, and determine if it's relevant to your scholarship search or not.
Search for all your other major scholarship searches and add them to Google Reader as well, and you will have your very own scholarships newspaper, delivered to your digital doorstep whenever you want to read it.
