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This is the fifth installment in a series of blog posts on generating sales leads with Google Alerts. If you missed the first post in this series, you can find it here.

I’ve spent the last few posts in this series focusing on the mechanics of managing sales lead alerts with AlertRank. Now I thought I’d switch gears and make some suggestions on search terms for finding local sales leads. Here are...

This is the fourth installment in a series of blog posts on generating sales leads with Google Alerts. If you missed the first post in this series, you can find it here.

The biggest weakness of Google Alerts as a lead generation tool is a total absence of reporting capabilities. The best you can do is forward individual emails, which is not a very effective way to share leads with your sales tea...

This is the third installment in a series of blog posts on generating sales leads with Google Alerts. If you missed the first post in this series, you can find it here.

Managing multiple Google Alerts effectively is the key to extracting the best sales leads from the results Google sends you. AlertRank is designed to take over this management process from your email program. This post will cover ...

This is the second installment in a series of blog posts on generating sales leads with Google Alerts. If you missed the first post in this series, you can find it here.

The catch-22 of Google Alerts is that the more results they deliver, the more they get in the way. This sample account is already getting 15 alerts a day, and that is with just 3 search terms. When you start following dozens of s...

Using Google Search to prospect for sales leads is a well known sales technique, and when you add Google Alerts you can make sure that your searches will be run automatically and continuously. Every time Google finds a new page that matches one of your searches, the new sales lead is delivered right to your mailbox. Unfortunately, Google Alerts can overwhelm you with too many emails. AlertRank s...

Auto-tweeting of Google Alerts has become one of the most popular features in AlertRank, and now that AlertRank accounts are free these auto-tweets are popping up everywhere. We’ve added lots of controls that let you fine tune your auto-tweeting, and I wanted to point these out.

Let’s take the public Google Alerts account I created for the food author Michael Pollan as an example. These ale...

I’ve been quiet on this blog for a while, because we’ve been making a lot of changes to the company and sites. The first big change is turning AlertRank into a free site. The site still supports up to 1,000 search terms per account, and you are free to create any number of accounts. Alerts are delivered by email with a full set of ranking information as soon as they are received from Google,...

People are always asking how to get their site listed in Google Alerts. The answer is simple, just comment on those sites that you find with Google Alerts. Google doesn’t send alerts for every mention of a search term. It only delivers results from sources it considers authoritative for these words. It isn’t as simple as PageRank, since that is a measurement of the site’s overall influence. ...

It is part of my job to read blog mentions of Google Alerts all day, and the same message keeps getting repeated: “Be sure to set up Google Alerts for your company and product names.” Sure that is important, but are you missing the most important part of the online conversation this way? When you meet people do you wait until they ask a question that is specifically about you before you say ...

I started a public Google Alerts account for Merrick Alpert the day he announced that he was running against Connecticut’s Senator Chris Dodd in the Democratic primary. Since then it doesn’t look like he is generating a lot of attention. This is a comparison of overall mentions of Dodd vs. Alpert on the AlertRank analytics page.

Alpert got a good bounce when he announced, but his rate of me...

It’s been 2 months since I started testing the idea of automatically sending selected Google Alerts to a Twitter account, and the results are pretty remarkable. The Twitter account for @marketing_alert has attracted over 1,500 followers.

When I created the account, I deliberately made it as clear as possible that this was an automatic process, and not a real human running the account. I use...

One way of creating buzz within a Twitter account is to add an air of “newsiness”. Instead of just tweeting about your own business, you can tweet about news in your community as a way of showing involvement and attracting followers who are interested in that community. I created a Twitter account yesterday based on my public Google Alerts account for the Border Cafe in Harvard Square to de...

I’m still trying to capture one of these Google Alerts that supposedly tell you when anyone searches for your name. Someone who thought this was happening for him was nice enough to reply to my request to see one or these alerts. He sent me this email:

If someone searches for my name and clicks on a link of mine Google sends me an email telling me which link they clicked on.

I asked to pleas...

It’s easy to get so involved with responding to your Google Alerts that you forget to review your search terms. I found myself in this situation the other day. I had a lot of search terms that I was just ignoring, because they weren’t targeted enough. Over time I was getting fewer and fewer actionable alerts. So I went back to the Google Alerts management page, and revised many of them, and ...

The public Google Alerts account for Viagra gives us an opportunity to see how reputation monitoring can be done in practice with AlertRank. The first step is getting an overview of how much traffic each of our alerts is receiving. This can be done by clicking the Analytics tab, and scrolling down to the summary table at the bottom of the page. We can order the results by the average number ...

I’ve been reading almost every single tweet about Google Alerts for the last 6 months, and there is one type of comment that I still can’t get to the bottom of. Every once in a while, someone will tweet something like, “Dude, I saw you Google me in my alerts!” Or they’ll say, “I love getting Google Alerts when someone searches for me.” The problem is that there is no way to do this. I’ve che...

Michael Pollan is an hugely popular author, as his public Google Alerts account shows, but keeping him in front of his fans is still important. It’s also necessary to spread awareness of his work to younger people who may not read the NY Times, but would be very receptive to his message of sustainable food. It looks like someone convinced him to start a Twitter account, but he hasn’t been v...

Tech bloggers need to be on top of all the latest news, and even when their personal network delivers news before it breaks, they still need to keep track of how the rest of the Web is covering them and their areas of interest. This public Google Alerts account is an example of how a professional blogger like Robert Scoble can use Google Alerts to track mentions of themselves, and collect ne...

Part of my job in managing the marketing and product strategy for AlertRank is watching the Twitter stream for mentions of Google Alerts. Although we aren’t connected with Google in any formal way, I have found myself in the unofficial position of Google Alerts product support. I see what upsets people about Google Alerts, and try to help them solve their problems. Some of the complaints are...

I thought that being a brand manager for Viaga would be challenging job, but investor relations for AIG has got to be pretty stressful. Right after I created this account a few days ago, Edward Libby, AIG’s CEO and Chairman, announced his resignation, so this public Google Alerts account has captured the reaction to that event. This account is not meant to be exhaustive, but it does demonstr...

A customer just asked me how to monitor job pages across a large number of sites. The answer is based on a common pattern in URLs. Most companies post their open jobs in a page with job or jobs in the URL. If you set up a Google Alert for any page with these words in the URL, you will be notified as soon as a new job is posted. The most general search is for any job page on any website:
in...

Now that the public Google Alerts account for the law firm Ropes & Gray has been collecting results for a week, let’s take a look at what we’ve found, and see if there is any useful material for marketing their services. Opening the account, and going to the Analytics tab, we can scroll down to see how the alerts are distributed among the various search terms.

It looks like antitrust has be...

I’ve started blogging on our new site for VibeMetrix, a product that simplifies the process of identifying key blog influencers and managing relationships with them. We think this is going to be a big help to PR people, and from what is going on in the tech blogosphere right now, it seems like it is right on time. ...

I wasn’t expecting this kind of a response from Robert Scoble to my comments on Mathew Ingram’s Blog regarding Twitter and their architectural issues. I really honestly appreciate the feedback on Grazr, even if it’s painful for me to hear as one if it’s creators.

First, I want to say, Grazr is still here. We have lots of users, just not as many as we’d like and not on the growth curve we’d been h...

What a relief to read Brian Solis’ TechCrunch post on the role of PR in Web 2.0. I’m sick of the “how dare you try to contact me” attitude of so many A-listers. The “just be cool and hang out at Valley parties” approach is not only elitist, it is damaging to the active economy that we need to develop on the Web. Companies have a right to try and get their message out to potential customers, and to...