How to set up Google Alerts

- [Instructor] Hey, I'm Brad Batesole and welcome to Marketing Tips. Today, I want to talk about 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. So one easy piece of automation that you can implement today is Google Alerts and the idea is simple. You set up a search and Google will deliver an Alert via email once it finds a piece of content matching your criteria. This is incredibly useful so you can set up an Alert for your company name, your domain name, any campaign slogans you're using, your competitors, or any topics that you're interested in. The idea here is really to keep tabs on what's being said so you can jump into the conversation or share an article when you've been mentioned. You can leave a comment on a blog post, email the writer additional details or even reach out via Twitter to compliment or critique the author. It just takes a few minutes to get set up so let's run through it together. You'll start at Google.com/alerts and you'll see the top of the screen, they have a search box, much like the one that you'd use to search Google for and ultimately that's what you're doing. You're simply creating an alert on a query that you would have searched Google for and then Google will automatically keep searching for that and posting about the changes. So let's say I want an alert about Microsoft. I can type that in and it's going to let me know that this will create an email alert for and then it will show you the email address that it's going to send it to. And you can see a preview of the type of information you're going to be getting in this alert. Now you can simply choose Create Alert, but that's probably not what you want to do. Instead, choose Show Options and now, you can go through and customize how often you want this alert. So for a broad search term like a brand name, say Microsoft, you might want to limit that to say, once a day. Which sources are you interested in. You can select multiples or you can choose just automatic. What language you're interested in. The region, how many, and then who you want to deliver it to. In that case, that's where your email address will show up. Then you simply choose Create Alert. Additionally, you can modify the alert just like any Google search term. So if you'd like to restrict say the term sales, simply apply that modifier to your search and it'll change the results. Thanks for checking in. As always, I'd love to hear from you. So follow me on twitter via @BradBatesole or on LinkedIn and let me know if you're using Google Alerts.