Cool Tool: Google Alerts

I do a lot of research on the internet and Google Alerts is a great tool that saves me hours of research every month. How it works is that you give it phrases you want to research and it sends you an email (You determine the frequency.) each time it finds these phrases on the internet. You can set it to search websites, news and blogs.

To test it out, I set up an alert for my name and my business name. The next day I got an email with a list of links to web pages with “Elge Premeau” or “eMarketing Strategist” on them. From this first alert, I discovered that a virtual assistant I talked to one time had made up a testimonial, attributed it to me and then posted it on her website. I also discovered that there are more people calling themselves an eMarketing Strategist than I thought!

Since then, I’ve set up a number of alerts on topics of interest to my clients. It’s enabled me to bring ideas and information to their attention. It’s sparked some interesting and creative marketing discussions. It’s also generated ideas for website content, marketing material, and article content.

Here are some of the things you can use Google Alerts for:
•   Stay on top of industry news and trends.
•   Get ideas and data for newsletter articles.
•   Get clues on what your competition is doing to marketing their business via the internet.
•   Know what others are saying about you or your business.

Google Alerts is kind of like having a research assistant keeping track of all the stuff you want to know about but don’t have the time to stay on top of. Instead of spending your time finding information, you can spend your time sorting through it. Of course, if you don’t have the time or energy to sort through it, you can always hire me to sort through it for you so you only have to go through the good stuff.

Check out Google Alerts at http://www.google.com/alerts and please let me know if you have any questions about it.