Many people do not seem to use Google Alerts as part of their digital marketing strategy. It is a very easy way to keep up to date with your niche, find content to create and monitor your competitors.

With Google Alerts you can receive an email every day to keep up to date with your niche and find content to curate and promote on social media.

Content Summary:

• What are Google Alerts?
  • google search - which Google runs automatically and emails any new results
• How to create a Google Alert?
  • https://www.google.co.uk/alerts

One of my secret weapons is “Google Alerts”.

It’s only secret because no one else seems to use it, and now I’m going to explain how I use it, so that you can benefit.

What is a Google Alert?

A Google Alert is essentially a Google search where Google do the search for me on a daily basis and email me the results.

I do not have to every day:

• go off to Google
• search for my niche
• filter for latest posts
• read through, skipping ads

Instead, I craft some very targetted Google Searches and add them as Google Alerts.

Google Alert Emails

I use Google Alert emails. Google Alerts can be used for RSS feeds, but I think emails are a little easier to handle and are more direct.

This morning I received the above Instagram Alerts Email.

I learned that Instagram now have changed the API for their business accounts to support scheduling. So tools can now schedule. Great. I didn’t have to go off to Google and do that search.

Google did it automatically. I stay up to date. And I now have content to curate.

How to Create Google Alerts

The way you set this up:

• you need to be logged in as your Google account,
• and go off to google.co.uk/alert or google.com/alert
  • I’m sure Google will redirect you to the correct domain based on your preferences or GEO location
• type in the Google search that I want to monitor
• check that the results are what I expect
• refine the search until I get the results I want
• click [Create Alert]

Example

If I want to monitor Instagram Marketing.

I would create a search for "Instagram Marketing". I put it in quotes because I want the exact search term.

In the results I see that results on SnapChat are coming back. I don’t use SnapChat so I don’t want that in my results so I amend the search to include -snapchat.

So my actual search was:

"Instagram Marketing" -snapchat

The secret to success with Google Alerts is learning how to use Google Search.

You can learn this over time because it is easy to edit and delete Google Alerts as you learn to search more effectively.

I don’t know if Google have a a limit on number of Alerts. I don’t think they do. I couldn’t find an authorative answer - all the answers I saw suggested 1000 alerts. Which seems plenty. But you can always setup more Google Accounts if you need more!

Add this to your tool list

This is a incredibly useful tool. It’s free from Google, as long as you’ve got a Google account go off to google.com/alert and start using this as a Secret Weapon in your marketing.

We know that signing up to email lists is really useful: you get curated content from other people. This is essentially curated content from Google that is relevant to the search terms and is very timely and up to date.

If you can learn how to use Google searches effectively to narrow in on your niche. You can receive news on a daily basis, that you can curate or just use to trigger ideas for your content marketing.

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