Most of you must have heard of Google Alerts already. If not, make sure you continue reading the rest of this blog post! This free service offered by Google notifies users via email when new results are found on the web for specific search terms. Google Alerts is a great service for marketing professionals as it can help them monitor their online presence with ease. Creating an alert takes less than a minute and it works great for home and small-to-medium businesses.

To create an alert, simply go to Google Alerts and enter a search term. I recommend you to use quotation marks (as in “Cool Example”) so the searches are more specific and you thus avoid receiving unwanted alerts. Then choose a type of page to be monitored, how often you want to receive alerts and how many alerts you want per email. Then enter your email address and… that’s it! You will need to confirm your email address though, and repeat the process if you want to create multiple alerts. Note that they are now also available as RSS feeds.

Still not sure how Google Alerts can help you as a marketer? Let’s say you have a product called “Blue Widget”. If you set an alert to be sent to you for the search term “Blue Widget”, you will receive emails whenever someone writes about your product on the web. You can not only receive alerts about your products but also about the products of your competitors. Without having to search for anything yourself, you can know when your competitors announce new products, launch special offers, etc. Google Alerts can also help you identify new competitors and monitor your personal online presence.

You can easily track your company, product(s), service(s) but also your competitors and anything else you would want to monitor on the web. These are only a few marketing uses of Google Alerts. I’m pretty sure there are several other uses that I don’t know about yet. If you use Google Alerts for marketing as well, feel free to share your own techniques with us! This service is a must-have for almost all types of marketers!