Google Alerts Tutorial
What is a Google Alert you ask? It’s a very powerful tool that can help you become efficient in your business on many fronts! A Google Alert is a simple mechanism that allows you to be alerted by email when blog/news articles, videos and more hit the web about subjects you are interested in. Here are a few pratical examples to give you a visual:
- Imagine you wanted to know if someone (whether a blog or news website) was talking about you or your company out there on the web - you can set up an alert to notify you "as it happens" by email.
- Imagine you wanted to join regular blog and news conversations about topics relevant to your business - you can set up an alert to let you know when those conversations are happening.
- Imagine you wanted to know what your competitors were up to - set an alert to be notified of any news about them!
Get the picture? Alerts are incredibly powerful information efficiency tools. The following section will tell you how to set up and use your own Google Alerts. It’s free, try it out!
- You do not need a Google account to set up alerts, however it is to your benefit to have one so that you can manage those alerts. You can sign up for an account here. If you already have an account you can also sign-in there.
- By default, Google alerts (when you sign in through your Google account) will default to your GMail account. You can have them sent to your own email addresses, all you need to do is associate that address in your Google Account: Click this link only after you have already signed into Google to associate your email.
Once you have successfully signed up for alerts, you can then try out a few things. Alerts works the same way as a Google query does and give you the choice of what source you wish to receive alerts from. You can get information from: Google News (only news articles from the wire), Google Blogs (solely blog articles and conversations), the web (everything - links to websites), Comprehensive (all three - news, blogs and web), videos, and groups (Google chat forums). To set up a query, use the same logic you would when searching for information in Google. For instance, let’s say I wanted to be alerted when my name came up in a blog conversation. I would:
- Set the search terms to "Kristen Veraldi" (quotes are important on multiple term phrases, this means only look for Kristen and Veraldi together - if i had not included them I’d get alerts on everything Kristen and everything Veraldi and everything Kristen Veraldi)
- Select Blogs as the type
- Set the frequency
- Enter the email I’d like alerts delivered to (make sure it’s registered in your Google account!)
That’s it! Google alerts would then keep me informed by email if anyone was talking about me out there in any blog conversations! Here’s another example, let’s say you wanted to keep a close eye on your local real estate marketplace for blogging ideas. Perhaps you’d set the following (using your own local of course):
Search Terms: "real estate" Vail OR "Beaver Creek" CO
Type: Blogs and News
Put the power of Google Alerts to work for you today!
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Comments
These Google alerts are great! In addition to alerts on Sharon Simms and The Simms Team, we get alerts on RE/MAX Metro (most of those don’t apply to our local company) and on downtown St Petersburg. It’s also good to keep track of neighborhoods or condo buildings that you farm.
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