Google Alerts Tell You What The World Is Writing About Your Business…And Your Competition
October 6th, 2009 by Bryan CzajkowskiHave you ever Googled yourself or the company you work for? Come on, you know you have! It’s human nature to wonder what others are writing about you and the company you work for. Before accepting your new position, didn’t you Google your new company to see if you could find any negative information? Googling is an easy way to lose hours sorting through irrelevant web entries hoping to find the information you’re repeatedly looking for. Valuable time and energy can be saved by using one of Google’s many convenient and useful tools, in this case, Google Alerts.
Google Alerts are emails or RSS feeds automatically sent to you when there are new Google search results for your specified terms. After signing up using your GMail account on the Google Alerts homepage, you 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. Google Alerts sends you an email each time a new page for your chosen term makes it in the top twenty results on Google’s web search. You can set up alerts for as many as 1,000 search terms. Google Alerts currently offers 6 variations of alerts - News, Web, Blogs, Comprehensive, Video and Groups.
- A News alert is an email aggregate of the latest news articles that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google News search.
- A Web alert is an email aggregate of the latest web pages that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top twenty results of your Google Web search.
- A Blogs alert is an email aggregate of the latest blog posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Blog search.
- A Comprehensive alert is an aggregate of the latest results from multiple sources (News, Web and Blogs) into a single email to provide maximum coverage on the topic of your choice.
- A Video alert is an email aggregate of the latest videos that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Video search.
- A Groups alert is an email aggregate of new posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top fifty results of your Google Groups search.
Google Alerts’ many uses make them convenient and helpful in our daily personal lives including monitoring a developing news story, tracking medical advances, being aware of what is being written about family members, and even getting the latest on a celebrity or sports team. But there are many professional reasons to harness the power of Google Alerts, find out how to put the power of Google Alerts to work for your business by downloading Ten Important Business Uses of Google Alert.
I’m about halfway through the book
With all of the buzz about Microsoft’s latest plight in the search game, Bing, I decided I should do a little research. Naturally where did I start? Google. As Google has become virtually synonymous with web search, Microsoft is fighting an uphill battle even with the troops that they have, but hopefully this will help those who are trying to make a decision a little bit.
Social media - everybody’s talking about it and trying to figure out how to use it for their business. There was a great panel discussion on Friday at the
As I am finishing out my
There are a lot of ways people will try to spend your money, especially during a difficult economy. When businesses are struggling, everyone is looking for the silver bullet to keep their business alive and there are plenty of people out there who say they have it for sale. But how do you decide which ones to try and which ones to pass on?