Google Alerts – Keep an eye on the Competition
Google Alerts – What Are They?
Google Alerts are one of those nice little Google offerings that is super easy to set up and lets you automatically keep up to date on information online that may be important to you. You can create Google Alerts on any topic that is valuable to your business and get instant, daily or weekly updates. For example, I get Alerts on ‘franchise software’ since anything that relates to both franchises and software may be of interest to me. They come in as small daily digests that I can skim.
A Competitive Edge
As a franchisor, or a rapid growth entrepreneur, you need to know what’s going on in your market. You also need to know what’s being said about your company and products in the online world. And you need to do all this without a large time investment. Google Alerts let you keep in touch either by email or via RSS feeds, and setting them up is a matter of minutes.
Set up a Google Alert
To set up a Google Alert, just go to www.google.com/alerts and type in the terms you are interested in, what type of information you want to know about (I recommend Comprehensive, but you can limit your alerts to the web only, to video only, to news only, to blogs only or to Google groups only), how often you want to receive the alert, and your email address.
Next, go to your email, and confirm the alert (Google sends an email with a link that you can click on for confirmation).
That’s it – you’re all set & good to go, and every day (or week) you’ll get a great digest of what has been happening online related to your chosen topic, with links so that if any of them are valuable to you, you can go directly to the original article.
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