Internet Marketing ABC

If you are not yet using Google Alerts, then drop everything else you’re doing and read this right now. It’s one of the most powerful tools in my business, it’s 100% free and it will keep you on top of your game.

I call Google Alerts my PIA (Personal Intelligence Agency). Because it’s almost like having your own “web agents” going out there, crawling the web for any new piece of information on any term you want.

The most important thing that you want to keep track of is your own name, and your business’ name. This way, everytime someone talks about you or mentions your business, you will know about it and can become part of the conversation. Prior to Google Alerts, big corporations where hiring people to do just that. There were companies that did nothing but that – they were called “media monitoring services” – they kept track of what the media says about them. Now, it’s not just the media, but it’s the whole web – blogs, websites, forums, news and videos.

This is extremely powerful – and you can also use it to keep track of relevant terms for your industry.

For example, if you are selling bird cages, you could set up Google Alerts of “bird cages” and keep track of every conversation and every piece of news that mentions the phrase bird cages.

Do you write a blog and are afraid that you won’t have enough ideas what to write about? Google Alerts will easily fix that. Just comment on what people are talking about, current events and so on. There is an unlimited amount of information on the web, and Google Alerts helps you to “wiretap” that information and filter out only what’s relevant to you.

Spy On Your Competition

Of course, you are free to not only get alerted about your own name and relevant industry terms, but also about competitors. So if your number one competitor is “Best Bird Cages Ltd.” then set up a Google Alert for that – and each time someone mentions them, or they put out something on the web, you’ll know about it.

Setting Up Google Alerts The Right Way

You can set up Google Alerts as Email service or as RSS feed. If you regularly use an RSS reader, I’d really recommend that option for you.

Next, if you don’t know about Google’s advanced search features, be sure to familiarize yourself with them. They can bring you a lot better results than just the basic standard searches.

I would always recommend that you go for the “comprehensive” option – but if you put in broad terms (like “Internet Marketing”) that can be overwhelming, because just about any forum post and blog that has the term in it will be sent your way. So in those cases, you might want to limit the notifications to News, and maybe Blogs.

The next thing is – you really want to schedule a certain amount of time for taking care of Google Alerts. Otherwise you’ll be all over the place. Google Alerts is great, but if you don’t set a time frame, you can end up spending your whole day chasing Google Alerts. So for example, say you’ll read and react to Google Alerts for 30 minutes a day at first. If you find that you get good results from that, you can commit to 45 minutes a day and see if that yields even better results that are worth the additional time investment. And so on. There are no hard rules for this. You gotta figure out for yourself what’s best for your biz.

And in case that’s not enough for you – there are other web intelligence services too:

• Windows Live Alerts
  I have tried them, and found that it really wasn’t worth the time. Google Alerts is so much more powerful.
• Yahoo! Alerts
  Yahoo generally has a younger crowd, so if you market to a young audience, then you should try out their service too.
• Google Alert
  (this one is NOT Google Alerts – it’s a professional solution that has free and paid accounts).

Recommended Reading:

• How To Build A Reputation Monitoring Dashboard