Imagine having a personal army of researchers for your business.
24 hours a day, 7 days a week, this army is out there looking for information that’s important for you to know. They’re looking at news items related to your industry, blog posts, changes to competitors’ websites, and more.
When they find something they think you should know about, you’re immediately notified.
You’d be pretty smart if you had this, huh? In fact, you’d probably know more about what’s going on in your industry then virtually anyone else out there.
This would help you spot trends, opportunities, and other actionable information before most people and you’d quickly establish yourself as the go to authority in your niche. Think that would be good for your business? You bet!
As it turns out, you can do all this and you don’t even need to hire your own army of researchers.
If you haven’t met already, let me introduce you to Google Alerts.
Google Alerts is a free service that allows you to easily keep track of information online that’s important to you and your business.
To use it, go to http://www.google.com/alerts. There you can enter any search term you want to keep track of. Then select the type of information sources you want Google to monitor for mentions of your search term (ie. blogs, news, video). Next, select how often you want to be notified when information about your search term is found. Last, enter your email address. Repeat for additional search terms.
Congratulations! You now have your own army of researchers scouring the deep corners of the web for information related to your business.
What should you set up alerts for?
Now that you know how to set up Google Alerts, let’s move on to what type of search terms you should get alerts for. Here’s a list of 7 to get you started:
1. Important industry/niche terms
2. Industry buzzwords
3. Your company name
4. Your name
5. Your product name (if applicable)
6. Your biggest/most important competitors
7. Your biggest/most important clients
Why keep track of all this?
Keeping track of these things offers a number of benefits.
You’ll know what people are saying about you, your company, and your products which is critical to monitoring your online reputation (for a good example of how this can work, go here).
You’ll be able to stay on top of what your competitors are up to.
You’ll know about media coverage in your industry which can help you get some PR (be sure to develop relationships with reporters who write about your industry/niche).
You’ll be able to join in the conversation on industry blogs which is a great way to drive traffic to your website.
Google Alerts is one of my favorite online research tools. To keep up with all the information that Google Alerts sends me for free would be at least one person’s full time job. And they probably wouldn’t be able to find it all.
With Google Alerts, it takes me just minutes a day to sort through the Alerts I receive to find the information that’s critical to my business.
If you aren’t using it already, I’d strongly recommend you start staying alert with Google Alerts.
Related posts:
{ 1 trackback }