Twenty years ago, if you wanted to know what your competitors were up to, you’d hire a private investigator or plant a spy — serious, dangerous, not-so-legal stuff! Twenty years from now, we’ll probably all share the same hive mind and the very concept of competition will be obsolete.
But in the meantime, the now time, if you’re looking for an easy and 100% free way to monitor what your competition is up to, check out Google Alerts.
Google Alerts isn’t a new service — curiously, it’s been wearing that beta tag for a couple of years now — but its power and effectiveness continues to grow.
With Google Alerts, you select a key word or words, identify what kind of alerts you’d like to receive (news alerts, blog mentions, video clips, etc.), indicate how often you’d like to receive the alerts (daily, for example), enter your email address and in a couple of clicks you’ll be receiving that information delivered directly to your email inbox. New hires, new locations, new products, new PR challenges — you can track everything with Google Alerts.
The sign-up process is delightfully intuitive, but if you’d like to see the process from start to finish, check out the short video included at the end of this post — it does a good job of walking you through each of the the steps.
A few things to remember that aren’t explicitly mentioned in the video:
- You do not need to sign up for a Google account, or have a Gmail address in order to use Google Alerts (though you will need an account if you wish to manage your alerts). All you need to get started is an active email address.
- The key words (aka: search terms) you use will determine what kind of results you receive. If you want alerts on “labour shortage” be sure to put those words side-by-side and in quotation marks (that indicates that you’d like to do a search on the phrase “labour shortage” Without the quotation marks, you could receive alerts about a shortage of doctors leading to problems in the delivery room.
- You can also use Google Alerts to check up on yourself! It’s a good idea to set up an alert using your own business name so that you can track what others are saying about you, too.
Google’s full FAQ on Google Alerts is another great resource if you’re looking for more love before you leap.
