A cool way to spy on what your competitors are saying about you…

Hi guys, 

I was in a mentoring session with a customer yesterday and we got on to the subject of how a competitor had been negatively mentioning my customer’s product in comparison to their own on blogs, articles and web adverts. I’m sure you’ll agree, pretty sneaky and underhand. My customer was understandably upset by this and troubled that he wasn’t even sure where on the web his product was being mentioned. 

Anyway, I suggested he sign up for the free Google Alerts service so that he can keep an eye on whats being said about him on the web. I thought it might be helpful to you so if you haven’t come across it check out www.google.co.uk/alertsand you will see a screen similar to the one below: 

 

Once there you can specify the term you want it to check, where to check and how often. It will then email you a list of webpages where that term is found based on the frequency you set. 

In my example above, I’ve set the term to be my name and you can see a preview of the search in the pane on the right. You could use it for your business name, employees, products – anything. You can even set up multiple alerts for lots of different terms. That way if someone mentions something on the web related to your alert terms you will be notified in an email. That’s a digital James Bond if ever I found one! 

Anyway, I hope you found that useful and if you have any questions about Google Alerts or my mentoring program simply drop me an email and I’ll do my best to help you out.