832: ACTION SATURDAY (setup Google Alerts!)
Today's action is one that EVERYONE can benefit from, including all of you wantrepreneurs all the way up to the 7- and 8-figure entrepreneurs! Setup Google Alerts for free on both YOUR personal name as well as the name of your business, course, book, podcast, or any other projects that you have to constantly monitor your presence and mentions on the internet. Plus, you'll hear some strategic ways that you can monitor your local competitors to gain insights into their traffic sources, marketing channels, and lead sources.
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Hey, what is up?
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Wantrepreneurs and entrepreneurs all over the world.
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It's Brian LoFermento here, host of the WANTrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast, and this is an Action Saturday episode that I'm really excited for, because it's really hard to sit down and think of an action that applies to WANTrepreneurs and entrepreneurs all across the board.
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But this is an action that I feel like I take for granted, because I have personally been using this thing, this tool, this strategy that I'm going to share with you in today's episode, since 2008.
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That is gosh.
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That is 16 years that I've been using this action and somehow, even though I've been using this for 16 years and it's been around a lot longer than that a lot of people still aren't aware of this tool and how they can use it to their own benefit.
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So this action is quite simply and it's free, by the way, this is a free tool that I'm introducing you to.
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This action is to set up Google Alerts.
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Set up Google Alerts.
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I honestly cannot believe that we have gone 832 episodes before I talked to you about Google Alerts.
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But what are Google Alerts?
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So Google Alerts is obviously.
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Google is the search engine that we all know.
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It crawls the web all day, every day.
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It's always finding new websites, new LinkedIn posts, social media posts.
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It's finding everything that hits the web, and so what Google has made available to all of us since the early 2000s is Google alerts, where, basically, you can go just just Google, create Google alerts and you'll find it.
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It's a very simple page.
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This is such an incredibly simple action, which is why I feel like every single one of you needs to take action on this.
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But basically, how it works is you tell Google what search words or keywords you want to monitor and anytime it sees those words pop up on the web, it will email you with a link to wherever it's mentioned.
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So this is incredibly important for all of us as entrepreneurs, because we all have company names, for example.
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So, 100%, you want to set your company name up as a Google alert If anyone writes anything about your company on the internet.
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You want to find that.
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In fact, early on, when I started my soccer blog, which was called Premiership Talk, that's how I found so many places that we were being featured.
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That's how I found PR that I didn't even know about, because we were being featured in English newspapers.
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How I found PR that I didn't even know about because we were being featured in English newspapers.
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I didn't live in England, I've never lived in England, and so Google Alerts was picking up that these English newspapers were mentioning my soccer website and I was getting an email about it.
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So you might be thinking, well, why is that beneficial?
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How is that actionable?
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Well, what I would then do is reach out to the journalists individually and I would say hey, thanks for finding my website, thanks for mentioning us in your recent article.
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I'd love to connect with you and see if there's any more opportunities for us to actually collaborate on some stuff together.
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And that led to so many opportunities.
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But that's an example of PR.
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You obviously want to monitor it for way more than just PR for potential customer service, for testimonials, for reviews, both good and bad.
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Don't think about Google Alert alerts as just trying to find bad things or just trying to find good things.
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You want to find all opportunities.
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If anyone's talking about your business, you want to be aware of it.
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And if you're sitting there thinking, well, brian, I don't have a business just yet, or maybe you don't have an established brand just yet, no one's talking about your business on the web, on the internet, well, guess what?
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You should have.
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Every single person listening right now must have a Google alert set up for their own name.
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So I have a Google alert set up for my own name for people who are involved in my different businesses.
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I have Google alerts set up for their names so that I can monitor things and see if there's anyone talking about any of our businesses so that we can jump into the conversation.
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If someone is talking about us on Reddit or on social media or someone left a review somewhere, we want to be able to find those.
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For me, particularly when I launched my book Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur that was back in 2015, I set up a Google Alert.
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Most things that I launch, I set up a Google Alert and in so many instances, I actually found out that people were tweeting about my book or they were writing about my book on their blog or they were including it in a list for Christmas time.
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My book was published in the fall.
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They were including it in a list for Christmas time of here's the top 10 books that you should buy the new entrepreneur in your life.
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And it was so cool to see those blog opportunities because I reached out to them, or those blog posts because I reached out to them for more opportunities to say, hey, do you want to do a live stream together?
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Do you want to do a webinar together?
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Do you want to create a blog post together?
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Do you want to create an online course together?
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I was constantly looking for those opportunities, but it stemmed from Google Alerts.
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So, at a minimum, you want Google Alerts on your personal name.
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You want Google Alerts on your business or businesses' names or online course names or your book's name, whatever it is.
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You want to set up Google Alerts, and this is something that you set it up once and it stays forever, which is really cool.
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Now, if you're sitting there and thinking, brian, there's not gonna be much action right now on my brand names or my personal brand name, how can I use Google Alerts to get an advantage?
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Well, quite simply, if there are competitors that you want to mimic their success, you want to more deeply understand their success roadmap, their marketing channels, their PR channels, where they're investing their time and their energy.
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You can also set up a Google Alert on some of your local competitors.
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You'll start getting insights that you cannot get simply by going to their website, because going to their website is cool.
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You can learn certain things about them, but you won't see on a day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month basis.
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What is it that they're doing?
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Where are they popping up?
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Where are they being talked about?
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Where are they generating traffic and leads from?
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If you set up a Google alert, you will get an email, either as it happens, as Google finds it, or you can set it up and say, hey, just email me once a day with all my Google alerts, or once a week, whatever frequency it is that you want to set up in Google alerts.
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But these are just some reallife, practical use cases.
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You can get very creative with this, but this Action Saturday episode is all about introducing you to the wonderful, strategic, helpful world of Google Alerts.
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So go out there, take action.
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I'll see you right back here tomorrow with another Solo Sunday episode.
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