How to set Google alerts

[Reyed Mia (Apprentice, DIU)]

How to set Google alerts

welcome to another episode of Marketing Tips. I'm Brad Batesole, and today we're talking Google Alerts. Now, I'm all about automating workflows wherever possible, and I'm sure you'll agree with me when I say there's an unbelievable amount of moving pieces in the day-to-day of marketing. And if your marketing is a team of one on top of managing a business or growing your startup, it's got to be tenfold. One easy piece of automation you can implement today is Google Alerts. The idea is simple.

You setup a search and Google will deliver an alert via email or an RSS feed once it finds a piece of content matching your criteria. It's incredibly useful to setup an alert for your company name, domain name, any campaign slogans you're using, your competitors, and so on. The idea here is to keep tabs on what's being said so you can jump into the conversation or share an article where you've been mentioned. You can leave a comment on the blog post, email the writer additional details, or even reach out via Twitter to compliment or critique the author.

Alerts can also be incredibly helpful in the event you're getting unwanted attention and need to spring to action and defend your reputation. It all takes just a few minutes to setup, so let's run through it together. You'll start at google.com/alerts. You'll see here that right at the top of the screen they have a search box, much like the one you'd search Google for, and ultimately, that's what you're doing. You're simply creating an alert on a query that you would've searched Google for.

Now, Google's also going to provide you with some suggestions if you'd like to setup some pre-configured alerts on popular sports players, companies, or issues surrounding finance. You may notice that the suggestions vary if you are signed in versus signed out. So, let's say I want to create an alert about my name. I'll type in Brad Batesole, and right away we're asked to provide an email if we're not signed in. And to the right of that, we have a drop-down to allow us to see additional options.

And at the bottom of the screen, you'll see a preview of all of the areas that match your results. So, let's take a look at these settings. First, you can set how often you'd like to receive the alert. You can receive it as it happens, so right when Google finds something, or you can get a digest once a day or once a week that lists all the mentions that happened in that period of time. You can filter by source, so if you're only interested in setting up an alert where you show up in the News, Blogs, around the Web, or in Video, you can do that.

You can filter by Language, Region, and you can identify whether you'd like to see all of the results or only the ones that Google feels are the best results. And this is particularly helpful if you often publish articles that get reposted around the web. That can fill up your alerts pretty quickly, so it might be best to select only the best results, and that way you'll filter it out some. You can always start will All results and come back and edit your alerts if they're getting a little unwieldy.

Now, if you'd like to view your alerts via an RSS feed, you will have to sign in with a Google account. And once you've done that, you'll have an additional drop-down to pick RSS feed. Thanks for checking in this week. As always, I'd love to hear from you, so follow me on Twitter @bradbatesole and let me know if you setup Google Alerts. Also, feel free to send a question my way, and you might just see it covered in a future episode. I'll see you next week.

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