Most Small Office / Home Office (SOHO’s) Entrepreneurs and Small to Mid-Size Business Owners don’t use or know about Google Alerts. Let’s face it, most of us are too busy just trying to keep the prospect and sales funnels full- RIGHT?
But we promise this one simple thing (Google Alerts) can have a profound impact on the way you run your business. Google Alerts are emails sent to you when Google finds new results — such as web pages, newspaper articles, or blogs — that match your search term. You can use Google Alerts to monitor anything on the Web. For example, people use Google Alerts to:Click to Watch Video
How do you set up you Google Alerts?
After visiting the Google Alerts home page, here’s what to do:
- find out what is being said about their company or product
- monitor a developing news story
- keep up to date on a competitor or industry
- get the latest news on a celebrity or sports team
- find out what’s being said about themselves
- Enter your query
- Enter your email address
- Confirm the alert you have created
- Try to be as precise as possible. The more precise your search terms are, the more relevant your alerts will be.
- Use quotes around a group of words if you are looking for them together. Examples:
- “Enterprise Resource Planning”
- “Betty Smith”
- Put quotes around a single word to match that word precisely as you typed it, excluding synonyms and spelling variations. Examples:
- “foard” (to stop Google including results for Ford)
- Michael “Jacson” (to stop Google including results for Michael Jackson)
- Use a minus sign (-) in front of words that you want to exclude. Examples:
- paris -texas
- apple -fruit
- Use the site: operator to limit your search to specific sites. Examples:
- physics site:.edu
- congress site:nytimes.com
- Use the site: operator with a dash to exclude specific sites. Example:
- “joe bloggs” -site:twitter.com