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I’m a big fan of Google Alerts. I love letting Google scour the web for me and provide me with a nice little email that tells me about (and links me to ) new articles about a particular subject that I may be interested in.

For example, I run a very local website called Arnold Talk (ArnoldTalk.com) which I post news articles and events that are related to my little town. So I set up a few alerts such as “arnold mo” and “arnold missouri”. Any time someone posts an article that mentions that phrase, I’ll get an email about it.

It’s great because I can have information about upcoming events before anyone else does, including the local newspaper.

So how can you use Google Alerts for your business?

Let’s say, for this example, that you run a business selling football supplies. You stock and ship footballs, helmets, pads, even trophies around the country.

You notice that your ranking for “red helmets” is low and you want to get a few links for that phrase. So you log into Google Alerts and add a new alert for that phrase. Make sure you use the quotes, or else you’ll end up with results that just mention the word ‘red’ and the word ‘helmets’ on the same page. That won’t do you much good.

So a day or two goes by and then you get an email from the Alerts telling you that there is a blog with your phrase. You click the link and see that its a high schooler who is blogging about his day, and he mentions the new red helmets they got this year. You look around and find his email address and shoot off an email similar to this:

Dear Johnny Quarterback,

Today I noticed that you had mentioned that your team got some new helmets for this years football season. Congrats!

I am an Internet marketer, and I would like to know if you’d be interested in creating a link in your recent post where you mentioned the helmets. If so, I’d be happy to pay you $5 for the link.

I hope your team does a great job this year, and wish you the best of luck on your football career.

Joe Mama
SportsRus.com

Now, it may work better for you if you just mention that you are a sports store owner, or you may want to skip that part altogether. The point is to get the link, and cheap. Since the chances are this blog isn’t read by too many people, the value of the link is not going to be high. But it’s a permanent link. And Johnny Quarterback will be thrilled to get $5 bucks.

Do you use Google Alerts to help you with your link building strategy? If not, why not? What’s more fun than using Google to beat Google?

By the way, if it works out and you get the link, I’d also follow up with him asking him not to post the fact that he sold a link (for obvious reasons).

Here’s a couple quick ways to keep up with the latest trends in your industry.

Set up a custom news feed with Google

Go over to http://news.google.com and type in your phrase. This will bring up all the latest news that mentions that subject. If you need a specific phrase, make sure you put it in quotes.

Then click on the RSS button in the lower left corner and sign up for this custom news feed. Now every day you’ll have the latest news about your industry right there in your RSS reader.

Over time, you’ll see mentions of related items that you don’t want to read about. I suggest you go back to the Google News page and rewrite your query, using delimiters such as the plus and minus.

Get Google Alerts

While the Google news thing is cool, it’ll only give you updates on actual news items that have been submitted. Since many people are publishing items in formats besides press releases, we want to be able to capture these additions to the web, too.

To do so, we’ll set up a Google alert with our same phrase(s).

Go to http://www.google.com/alerts and you’ll see this page:

In the “Search Items” box, put in your same search criteria that you used on the news site. You can use quotes and other delimiters just as you did above.

Depending upon how often you want these alerts, choose the correct option in the “How Often” area. If you’re running a news site, you’ll want to put the “How Often” to “As it happens”. That way you can get that info onto your website as soon as possible. If you are just trying to keep up with trends, leave it at “once a day”.

Now plop in your email address. Now every time Google indexes a new page on the Internet that includes your specific phrase, you’ll get an email.

You can use these same methods to keep an eye on your competition as well, your own business name, or even mentions of specific products that you carry. Watch for bloggers that are mentioning your business and drop a comment on their site. They’ll be blown away that you visited their blog and you’ll have an even stronger chance of getting future referrals from them.

By the way, this should not be confused with Google Trends, an online way of watching search trends over time. That’s a nice tool too, but not what I was going for here.

Certainly over the months or years you’ve been marketing your wares online, you’ve come across a few key competitiors that you’d love to keep tabs on.

Part of keeping in tune with the niche you are in is watching the competition to see what they’re up to. Visiting their site(s) all the time trying to find their new content can be a real pain.

Enter the wonderful site: command. This little ditty can be used to our advantage.

When you use the site: command, you are asking the search engine to list out all the pages that it has indexed for a website (well, not all of the pages, but close).

Google alerts, on the other hand, lets us know any time a new phrase or word shows up on the Internet. For instance, if I want to know who is mentioning me, I may run a Google Alert for the phrase “Will Hanke” (with the quotes, of course). Every time someone mentions me (hopefully in a good way), Google will index that page, and it will send me an alert letting me know about the new page, and will provide me a link to said site.

So we can use the alerts in this manner, but instead of being alerted to a certain phrase, we want to be alerted every time there is a change to the list of indexed sites Google has for our competitor.
First, sign up for Google Alerts

In the ‘Search Terms’ box, type this exactly as you see it: site:domain.com

The domain.com should be replaced with your competitors website URL. There are no spaces.

Keep the Type as ‘Comprehensive’

Set your preferences and email. Now any time there are new pages indexed by Google, they’ll send you an alert letting you know about it.

Keep in mind, search engines only crawl low-level pages every 4-6 weeks, so don’t expect a bunch of updates in your email. They’ll more likely trickle in, but at least you’ll know what’s new there!