I was out surfing the internet as I often do and I came across a post by someone about "Google Alerts". What the heck is that? Well I sort of need to back up just for a second.
I belong to an online club where people (marketing types, small business owners, offline businesses, etc) go to exchange proven and untested ideas on marketing, they also talk about their favorite marketing guru's and what those types suggest or do (Dan Kennedy, Gary Halbert, Jay Abraham, Ken McCarthy) to name a few. Well one person is a direct marketer that specializes in a product designed to help marketers get their information seen, without going into her deal or plugging her product it is in the "lumpy mail or grabber" variety of sales piece.
Well she had landed a decent sized client that she had wanted to cultivate into a regular client plus she was wondering how the current news would effect this client and possible future clients just like them. Well me being highly opinionated(not necessarily right, just needing to put my two cents in) I went looking to see what was out there. I am sure there are news sites that will sell you more or less a subscription service, sort of a "clipping service". (Clipping services will usually subscribe to hundreds of publications and whenever your name or other criteria selected is mentioned they forward you that article.)
Back to her question and how easily Google Alerts has made it for her and everyone else out there, not to mention how they have either put clipping services out of business or just "Made their day". With Google Alerts you now can create an easy path to lead you into information that might otherwise go unnoticed or missed. And relevant and timely information. For her, if I remember right she was wondering how the "stimulus package" would be of concern for Financial Planners well she could have Google Alerts created for "financial planners", "stimulus package" and one that had all four words "financial planners stimulus package". Whenever anything is discovered by Google she gets alerted.
How do you use "Google Alerts"? Well I can imagine you already have thought of some ideas, I know just typing this in has made me think of a few more, such as having individual Google Alerts for each of my own guru's that I follow, marketing ideas, websites that get renewed and googled. You could take that last one, websites googled and if say you had an interest in "joggers blogs" but as a whole instead the individual site posts you could put this in your Google Alerts. Or maybe you like the idea of a wider search criteria, you would then do the jogger and blogs without quotation marks around them like this.
Anyway you slice it, make it your own and use it for all its' worth, can you imagine how smart your kids or if you are the kid, how smart your teachers will think you are if when they required a book report on "Robert Frost essays" that was due in a week, you could put that in a "Google Alert" and sit back and let it collect all the information from multiple sources? Very smart indeed. How about the business owner that is looking for marketing tips? (Darn it all, there I go again opening up a can of worms to go fishing for information with.) =*)
Go open up Google Alerts and see what you too will love about it, and if you have some great feedback please bring it on back here and leave your comments.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment