Finding Scholarship on the Internet

If you're serious about securing scholarships to help pay for college, you should definitely not overlook the Internet as a resource. Simply by Googling the term "college scholarship," you can uncover hundreds, if not thousands of useful leads worth pursuing. But to get the most out of your college scholarship search, try following the below steps.

Making the Most of Your College Scholarship Search

• Be sure to vary your search terms so that you cast as wide a net as possible. If you live in Texas, for example, type in "Texas scholarships." If you play baseball, be sure to type in "baseball scholarships." If you tailor your search strings appropriately, you should be able to receive extremely detailed feedback.
• Be sure to save your profiles and "auto fills" so that you can cut down the time it takes to fill out forms or search for options.
• Bookmark any entries that show promise. You'd be surprised how often you might forget about that great little scholarship that you came across last week.
• Isolate college scholarship portals that provide numerous links to other scholarship sites. Using these as home bases, you can branch out very methodically and cover all of your potential options.
• Try using different search engines. Google and Yahoo are terrific, but smaller search engines use slightly different algorithms to produce results. Remember, the name of the game is casting as wide a net as possible.
• Store up a database of names, URLs, e-mail addresses, and links in a spreadsheet. It also helps to input deadlines or criteria in the spreadsheets so you can determine exactly what needs to be done and when at a glance.