Put Google’s Free Agent to Work for Business

Who is Megan?

Hello, my name is Megan Garrison. I’m a Coldfusion Developer and Web Designer and try to help Judy out with the tech side of things. I’ve been on the internet for quite a while, but never got interested in Internet Marketing until recently. It all just seemed like a lot of hype to me. Then I met Judy online and her enthusiasm is infectious. She showed me some great information by Michael Cheney that I had not seen before and I thought, “Wow! this could really help a LOT of people!” so I jumped on board.

From time to time I will be contributing a guest post on some tech topic or resource. This is my first one and I hope you will find it helpful.

Drinking from the Fire Hose

The amount of information on the web is so vast that it’s impossible to keep track of it all. Even if you decided that you only wanted to stay up on developments and issues within your particular niche, monitor who is mentioning your business, and keep an eye on news or blog items about your competitors, the job would be so daunting that you might consider hiring someone to do it for you — if you only knew where to find the right agent.

Well, guess what, there an intelligent agent available that will email you new information on any topic you specify as it appears and you won’t have to pay a cent. I’m talking about Google Alerts.

Google Alerts are one of Google’s lesser-know treasures. Basically, it’s a service where you sign up to get an email alert for any keyword search you specify. For instance if you want to keep track of when and where your business name is mentioned you can choose to have Google search for it in any of the following categories:

News
Blogs
Web
Videos
Groups
Comprehensive

Depending on how frequently you want to be notified, you can choose to have alerts emailed to you once a day, once a week, or “as it happens”. (If there is a lot of activity on a certain topic or set of keywords, you might want to avoid “as it happens” since it could result in your inbox getting filled up with more separate emails than you would want to deal with).

You can use Google alerts for a myriad of tasks:

To keep track of your business reputation
Scout the competition
Stay Up-to-Date on developments and issues within your particular niche or industry
Stay current on other topics that interest you
Search for customers by setting up alerts for various questions your target clients might ask
Watch for certain announcements
Check for plagerism of your content
See if your press releases are being distributed (and where they are showing up)
Determine the latest market trends
Get Ideas for blog topics or informational articles
Be notified when a new service or product becomes available
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