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How Does It Work Google Alerts sends you an email each time a new page for your chosen term makes it in the top twenty results on Googles web search. You can also have the alert check Google News and/or Google Groups. To sign up for a Google Alert, all that you need to do is visit the Google Alerts homepage (http://www.google.com/alerts), enter the search term, type of alert (search Google News, Google Groups, or the web), frequency of emails (daily, as it happens, or weekly), and your email address. You can set up alerts for as many terms as you like using a Google Account. So why would you want an unlimited amount of alerts? Because as a business owner, you have a lot to keep track of and very limited time to do it. Spy on Your Competitors Every business has a competitor. More likely, you have several direct competitors and several more indirect competitors. While regularly checking out their websites is an important part of the process, it doesnt paint the whole picture. A competitors website is very much crafted to the image that they want to portray to their customers. This is great if you want to know what their latest sale is or how much their new product costs, but it isnt likely to feature a negative review in last Sundays newspaper. Thats where Google Alerts comes in. By simply setting up a News, Groups, and search alert for each of your competitors, you will know what other people are saying about your competition both the media and consumers, both good and bad. Keep Up To Date on Your Industry Equally as important as what people are saying about your competition is what people are saying about your industry in general. If theres a negative PR swing against violent video games, and you just happen to run a video game store, you will probably be affected. By receiving alerts on important key words related to your industry, you can be on top of any sudden changes and react accordingly. By the time your competition realizes whats happening they will be scrambling to catch up to you. Track Yourself and Your Business It goes without saying, if its important to know what people are saying about your competitors and about your industry, it would stand to reason that its important to know what people are saying about you. I have Google Alerts on both my name and my businesses name. I know that they go hand in hand if one is getting slandered you better bet it will hurt the other. By receiving alerts, you can be on top of anything negative relating to you or your business, and hopefully nip any problem in the bud before it grows too large. On the flip side, theres nothing better than receiving an alert where someone praises your business. Those are the types of things that you want to make sure are on the PR page of your businesses website. Get News Stories for Your Site or Blog I own a site where I do weekly news updates about whats going on in the industry. Some weeks, there are tons of news items to choose from, other weeks its hard to find anything. In addition to the regular industry news sites that I check to get information, I have Google Alerts set up for each of the key terms. Youd be surprised how frequently a unique story from a local newspaper pops up in Google News. Many times these stories havent been seen by my competitors and I am able to break the news to the online community. This works well for blogs too if you have a daily blog about being an entrepreneur, having an alert for the word entrepreneur can fetch you several quality stories each day to help inspire fresh posts. In this increasingly competitive business world, you need each and every leg up on your competition that you can get. Used properly, Google Alerts can be an extremely efficient way to track whats going on across the web. The alternative would be to search each term every day for new updates. Who has time for that? Spending less time researching enables you to spend more time on the things important to your business. |
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