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.

21 Things to Research for Your Online Business

As discussed in the last post, successful online marketing starts and ends with research. All other things being equal, the marketer that does the best job at research wins.

So what sorts of questions should you being looking to answer with your research? Here’s a list of 21 to start with . . .

1. Where do your prospects “hang out” online?
2. What other products/services do your prospects buy?
3. What conversations do your prospects have going on in their heads when they’re looking for your product/service (or related ones)?
4. What specific problems do prospects want your product/service to help them solve?
5. What are the exact words they use to describe these problems?
6. What is the level of sophistication of the market (ie. is it a fairly new market that hasn’t been marketed to a lot or a mature one where the prospects have seen and heard it all from advertisers)?
7. What is the level of awareness of the market (ie. is your product/service relatively new and unique or is it widely known)?
8. What similar products/services are being offered by your competition?
9. How is your product/service the same as the competition’s?
10. More importantly, how is your product/service different from the competition’s?
11. Where is your competition advertising?
12. What are the specific offers your competition is making?
13. Who are potential joint venture or affiliates you could partner with?
14. What are the latest industry trends?
15. What are the latest national/global trends that could be influencing your prospects and customers?
16. What are the most widely read blogs in your market?
17. What are the most widely used message boards in your market?
18. What are the most widely used social networking sites/groups in your market?
19. What potentially underserved niches exist in your market?
20. What are the most common benefits mentioned in ads targeted to your prospects?
21. What keywords would prospects be typing in to find your product/service (or a related one)?

Successful Online Marketing Starts and Ends Here

I thought something had died in my front yard.

The smell was just horrendous. When I saw what appeared to be the source of the smell, I was even more disturbed.

Growing out of the mulch was a phallic shaped whitish reddish almost mushroom looking thing. Upon closer inspection (at least as close as I wanted to get!) I noticed there were a few of these alien like growths protruding out of the ground and there was no doubt they were the culprits producing that nose hair singing smell.

I didn’t know what to make of these things so I did what pretty much everyone does these days when they need information . . . I went straight to Google.

Not knowing what they were, I typed in the following search query – “stinky whitish reddish phallic looking things in mulch” and within a few seconds I had identified my problem – the aptly named Stinkhorns. Within a few minutes I knew more about Stinkhorns than 95% of people worldwide. I was a virtual Stinkhorn expert (not that that’s something to brag about).

What does this have to do with online marketing? It’s this . . .

The Internet is the greatest research tool that has ever been available in the history of the world.

That’s a good thing for Internet marketers because few, if any, things are more critical to successful marketing campaigns than research.

And research is the next topic in our Fundamentals of Marketing Online series. We’re going to look at what to research, how to research, and specific tools you can use to conduct your research.

Now I know what you’re thinking.

Research isn’t fun. It’s boring. It’s tedious.

But that common mindset presents a golden opportunity for you. Because once you understand the importance of research, once you understand how to do it effectively, and once you regularly incorporate research into your online marketing activities, you can easily out-market and out-sell all the competitors in your niche who are too lazy to take this critical step.

And I can’t think of anything more fun or exciting than that!