Watch This Video. Save Hours a Week.

This video picks up on our recent blog posts about Google Alerts and Google Reader and connects the two together. If you need to keep track of a lot of information online the techniques shared in this video will blow your mind and save you countless hours a week!

Can You Read 100 Blogs in Less Than an Hour?

Imagine if the Post Office didn’t exist. How would you get your mail?

You’d have to be in regular contact with all the people, businesses and organizations that you like getting mail from. And when they have something for you, you’d then have go to them to get it (yeah, I’d skip the places that just have bills and junk mail too!).

Sounds like a very inefficient, time-consuming, and ridiculous system for getting your mail. Right?

But this is exactly the way that most people keep track of their favorite blogs and websites. As a result, they waste loads of precious time constantly checking for new posts, news, articles, videos and more.

There’s a better way. It’s called the RSS feed.

RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. It’s basically a tool that lets you subscribe to your favorite feeds (ie. blogs, websites, etc.) and automatically get any new content they publish sent directly to you. It’s kind of like your own online Post Office delivery system (with the welcome exception that you have total control over who you receive information from – no bills, no junk mail, no letters from “long lost” relatives when you win the lottery).

To manage your feeds, you’ll need an RSS reader. The most popular one is Google Reader. As with most of Google’s tools, Reader is free and easy to use. You can find it at www.google.com/reader

We’ve been discussing the importance of research to your online marketing endeavors. A big part of that is staying current on the latest trends and news in your industry. Google Reader is yet another great research tool and a great time saver which allows you to that in a very efficient way.

In the next post, I’ll share a video that will show you a how to combine the power of Google Alerts (which we talked about in our last post) and Google Reader. Plus, the video will also share a little known trick that could potentially save you an hour or more a day even if you’re already using Google Reader!

Stay Alert

Imagine having a personal army of researchers for your business.

24 hours a day, 7 days a week, this army is out there looking for information that’s important for you to know. They’re looking at news items related to your industry, blog posts, changes to competitors’ websites, and more.

When they find something they think you should know about, you’re immediately notified.

You’d be pretty smart if you had this, huh? In fact, you’d probably know more about what’s going on in your industry then virtually anyone else out there.

This would help you spot trends, opportunities, and other actionable information before most people and you’d quickly establish yourself as the go to authority in your niche. Think that would be good for your business? You bet!

As it turns out, you can do all this and you don’t even need to hire your own army of researchers.

If you haven’t met already, let me introduce you to Google Alerts.

Google Alerts is a free service that allows you to easily keep track of information online that’s important to you and your business.

To use it, go to http://www.google.com/alerts. There you can enter any search term you want to keep track of. Then select the type of information sources you want Google to monitor for mentions of your search term (ie. blogs, news, video). Next, select how often you want to be notified when information about your search term is found. Last, enter your email address. Repeat for additional search terms.

Congratulations! You now have your own army of researchers scouring the deep corners of the web for information related to your business.

What should you set up alerts for?

Now that you know how to set up Google Alerts, let’s move on to what type of search terms you should get alerts for. Here’s a list of 7 to get you started:

1. Important industry/niche terms
2. Industry buzzwords
3. Your company name
4. Your name
5. Your product name (if applicable)
6. Your biggest/most important competitors
7. Your biggest/most important clients

Why keep track of all this?

Keeping track of these things offers a number of benefits.

You’ll know what people are saying about you, your company, and your products which is critical to monitoring your online reputation (for a good example of how this can work, go here).

You’ll be able to stay on top of what your competitors are up to.

You’ll know about media coverage in your industry which can help you get some PR (be sure to develop relationships with reporters who write about your industry/niche).

You’ll be able to join in the conversation on industry blogs which is a great way to drive traffic to your website.

Google Alerts is one of my favorite online research tools. To keep up with all the information that Google Alerts sends me for free would be at least one person’s full time job. And they probably wouldn’t be able to find it all.

With Google Alerts, it takes me just minutes a day to sort through the Alerts I receive to find the information that’s critical to my business.

If you aren’t using it already, I’d strongly recommend you start staying alert with Google Alerts.