If not, you are missing out on a cool rich feature that Google offers free! You need a Google account, so if you don’t already have one (like a Gmail account) you can get one at www.google.com/accounts.
So what can you do with Google Alerts? First of all, think clipping service, but not the old kind that only had access to a small number of newspapers or news websites. Google Alerts can find information on all kinds of websites, news sites, blogs, videos and news groups. If there are any searches that you do repeatedly, here is the perfect way to automate them.
You can set an Alert to look for what’s being said about you, your business, and your competition.
You can set it to look for mention of your business interests, or for live events like exhibitions or seminars. You can look across all information types, or you can limit it, for example, to let you know every time a new video about "successful business building" arrives on the web. If you are researching a topic, Alerts are priceless.
Do some brainstorming to come up with keyword phrases of things that might be valuable to you. The more specific you are with the search terms and limitation, the better your results will be. Then set up your alerts at www.google.com/alerts. Be creative! You can have up to 1000 Alerts at this writing.
When Google finds a new mention of your Alert topic(s), it sends you an email with a description and a link. You can choose how frequently you want to see the Alerts: as it happens, once a day, or once a week. If you have a lot of Alerts, you can even set your email program to filter these Alerts and put them in the same folder. That way they won’t clutter up your inbox and you can examine them at your leisure.
So get going! Let Google work for you, for free!
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