These tips are geared for start-ups and small business owners. This series features free tools to help you market and promote your business.
Free Marketing Tools – #1 Google Alerts
Imagine having your own online researcher scouring the internet 24/7, 365 days a year that you didn’t have to pay a single penny! If I have peaked your interest, please read on…
Google Alerts are simply one of the coolest, easiest and totally FREE ways to stalk, ‘er I mean keep tabs on anything or anyone of interest! They are an awesome tool for marketing research and keeping tabs on when and where your name is in the news.
For starters, I suggest you set Google Alerts to monitor such things as:
Your name as well as the names of important clients or key customers. (For example, I have searches set for “Lori Tilt” and “Lori Reed Tilt” as well as for specific client names.)
Your company name as well as company names you track. (i.e. “Tilt Marketing” and “zumBrunnen, Inc.” – one of my long-term clients.)
Keywords for your business or industry (i.e. “electric radiant floor heating” on behalf of long-term client Speedheat)
You can also track your competitors, follow industry trends, monitor developing news, follow your favorite celebrities, keep tabs on your favorite sport teams, and more…at absolutely zero cost!
Additionally, you can set up the alerts to be emailed as often as desired, and you may turn them on or off as you wish.
If you want to sign up or manage your settings, here is a link to Google Alerts.
If you found this article helpful, please be sure to come back to read my entire series on Free Marketing Tools and also review my series on Marketing Mistakes to Avoid and How to Fix Them!
Very helpful!
Ok, so I have my Google Alerts set up, and I get an alert that someone looked at one of my blog posts. What does that tell me? Is there a way to see WHO it was on my blog, or how they got there – were they referred to that site from something else?
Thanks for the info, your posts are very helpful!
Your website host should have information about how many visitors come to you site and visit your blog, as well as what pages they click through and some information about what browser they are using and if they came to your site through a link or directly. I recently added Google Analytics, also free, to help provide a higher level of monitoring, as well. You can get an idea of what articles/postings are most popular and what pages of your site people visit most often as well as how much time they spend on the site.