576 – Tracking that helps YOU: Tom talks Google Alerts

Episode 576 – Google Alerts
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey, everybody, is Tom here with Episode 576 of Screw the Commute podcast? Today we're going to talk about Google Alerts. It's a free tool that I've been using for many, many years now. Before Google, I had to pay for this service and you can use it for reputation management, publicity, tracking competitors and making your hobbies tax deductible, which if you've been listening to me for a while, you know, I harp on that. That was episode 169. If you want to make your hobbies tax deductible, you'll learn how in that episode. So I'm going to tell you how to set up Google Alerts. What you can use it for, and I'll give you some cool tricks to better target your results. All right. I hope you didn't miss Episode 575. That was Genesis Amaris Kemp, and she tells you how to stick up for yourself and what it's meant to her by doing that. And she got a $20,000 raise just for opening her mouth to tell to tell the people that, hey, you know, she was doing the work that deserved that money and they gave her a $20,000 race. Pretty cool. All right. Let's get into it. So. Google Alerts. So what is it? Well, it's a free service where you can put in keywords and you'll get notice when that keyword shows up on the web. Of course, this all comes back to what I've been harping on for 25 years.

[00:01:53] Right. Keyword research. And if you need a bone bone up on that, which you probably do, go to episode one and episode 130. Episode one is the basics. And Episode 130 is the changes based on voice search, which people are doing on their cell phones and tablets all the time. All right. And all the things that I tell you are in no particular order of importance. It's just whatever is most important to you. But let me tell you a way to get publicity using Google alerts and the concept of news jacking. That's a term that was invented by one of my previous guests, David Merriman Scott. I don't know what episode that was, but he's a cool guy. So one of my martial arts teachers and good friend Alan Berris, is an active shooter expert. Unfortunately, we need those nowadays. But anyway, so I told him, you know, put all the terms related to active shooters in Google Alerts. And then you will get notice of when an active shooter event happens. And then you can go Google the news outlets in the area where it happened. So, for instance, I'm just making this up. I don't know about any active shooting events in Tulsa, Oklahoma. So then you get notice or he gets notice of an active shooter event in Tulsa, Tulsa, Oklahoma. He calls up the radio and TV stations. In those areas that he Googled by finding those on Google.

[00:03:37] And then he presents himself as an expert on active shooters. And this is news jacking. See, it's much easier to get publicity when something's already in the news. That's the David Merriman Scott. He's got a whole book on it called News Jacking. So I've read it years ago and been I've been doing it myself for a long time. So that's a way to get publicity. Find out when something about your thing happens that's going to be mentioned online and then you can jump on it. And if it's newsworthy, I mean, some maybe if a new plumbing thing was invented, that's not going to. That's not going to be on the major news. But if it if it's something that is major news related, you can get lots of publicity by just presenting yourself as an expert because they're talking about that topic. And then any time that topic comes up, if you did a good job on your interview. You're going to be in there file to call. The next time that topic comes up automatically, they'll call you automatically. So that's news jacking and publicity using Google alerts. All right. Now, another thing its is keeping track of your brand. It's one of the cheapest forms of reputation management. So what you do is you put your name and your company name in there. Now, what if you have a common name like David Scott? Well, he branded himself a long time ago with a unique middle name.

[00:05:07] Merman. David Merman Scott. So he he branded himself years ago like that. But maybe you don't want to do that or it's too late in your career to do that. So let's say your name is John Roberts. You can put your name. And again, I'll use plumbing. Let's say you're in the plumbing industry. You can put your name John Roberts in quotation marks. You'll learn why shortly of why put quotation marks around your name. And then add the word plumbing. So this will cut out all the John Roberts that aren't associated with plumbing. Now you would put in a separate alert for your company name. Maybe it's, let's say, same day plumbing. And by the way, you can have up to 1000 alerts per Gmail account. So don't hold back. I mean, the only reason you would hold back is if you were getting too many alerts per day for stuff that's unrelated to what you were looking for. And that's probably because you didn't target your keywords carefully enough. And another thing, maybe there are other companies in different states that aren't you named same day plumbing. Well, you can filter them out by putting in a geographical area that you want to concentrate on. Oc the same way you can keep track of yourself. You can keep track of your competitors. I was even using it to track the scumbags I was going after in my scam brigade consumer advocate role.

[00:06:45] You can check out the trailer to our show in development called ScamBrigade.com. But when they put out your competitors, put out a press release or someone else praises them or rags on them, you'll know about it. And you can use that information to improve your business. And the bad information you can find out about them can be used to knock them down. Typically if you're making a sales presentation, which is this is a something happened from my past. So I was speaking for Hallmark cards a long time ago. So I had keywords with regard to greeting cards and Hallmark and all the stuff that made sense at the time. But prior to that speech. So the morning I went down to do the speech right before up in my hotel room, I checked my Google alerts and there was something that came out about Hallmark cards. So I jotted it down, worked it into my speech. So I'm speaking to all these executives from Hallmark cards, and I'm talking about stuff they didn't even know about. So. So it made me look like a freaking genius. All from Google Alerts say so this is something very, very, very powerful you can use in in your business presentations, your speeches and so forth. All right. Let's say here's another thing. Let's say part of your marketing strategy was to do guest blogging. So your guest posting on other people's blogs and you want to find out blogs that would accept your guest post.

[00:08:35] Well, you could set up an alert, something like in quotation marks. Right, for us. And then you could choose blogs as the only place a Google was looking for that term. So you're not getting a bunch of other places. Maybe another term would be submit your post. I mean, this is where you have to do your keyword research for what you're trying to accomplish because if you just keep putting generic keywords in, you'll just get buried with too many results and then you'll start ignoring them and you won't look at it. All right. Maybe you invented some fire safety device or maybe you that's a product you're selling. Well, you could set an alert for a house fire or apartment fire or even. Alarm fire, you wouldn't, you know. The reason I say that is because the news might report a five alarm fire. Well, you don't know what the number would be, so you wouldn't want to put that in your search term. But you'll hardly ever see alarm fire other than if there was a fire and a certain number of. Trucks and stuff had to respond to it. Maybe it'd be devastating fire. Maybe it'd be heartbreaking. House fire. I mean, again, you've got to do your keyword research. And remember, you can have 1000 alerts per email address. So go ahead and make some generic ones, but make a bunch of very precise ones that you know are good for your business.

[00:10:11] And again, I got to harp on it, episode one and episode 130. Any time you want to get to a back episode, make sure you put screwthecommute.com, slash and then the episode number. That would be episode 1 and then a separate one for episode 130. Hey, and while you're messing around with screw the commute, pick up a copy of our automation e-book. You know, we've been giving this away. And it's helped thousands of people save millions of hours and keystrokes and all these things so you can spend more time, newsjacking and doing all the stuff I'm telling you in this issue to respond to your Google alerts rather than fighting with your computer. So pick your copy up at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And while you're over there, pick up a copy of our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app, and you can put us on your cell phone and tablet and take us with you on the road. Okay. Let's talk about hobbies again and again. The episode for making them tax deductible is episode 169. But here's a method you could start a golf news website. Now, where do you get the news? Well, you get the news from Google Alerts and this is where you might have a geek set this up for you if you're not tech savvy.

[00:11:40] But Google Alerts can deliver the alerts to you through a thing called an RSS feed. In other words, it comes automatically to you and shows up on your blog. And you could put golf affiliate sites on there so you could monetize. The site and that makes it a business a tax deductible. Check with your CPA, an accountant, but they've all cleared it with me. That that's is how it works. So people come to your site to get their golf news and then they see all your other stuff, all your you know, and then this makes your your golf stuff tax deductible. So you could go play golf and interview people, interview groundskeepers at the golf course. I mean, you know, when's the last time somebody's interviewed them? But it's probably a lot of interesting things. On how they cut the fairways. I see the one high school job I did have was cutting grass on a golf course and they wouldn't even let me cut the fairways. I was only allowed to cut the rough because there's ways you got to do it. They don't want to ruin the the fairways, and there's no way they would let you cut it green. All right. That was all the older guys that have been there for years doing that, see, but all this stuff could be on your blog and you could have a lot of fun with it.

[00:13:05] And it's your hobby, and you're making a tax deductible. Beautiful. Just a spinoff of that is if you're not if it's not hobby related, you could just make a news in your industry site. Use the same RSS feed. Get somebody to hook it up for you. And there you go. You got people are coming to your site for industry news, but they're being exposed to you and your products and services all the time. And then, hey, you could even if it was just for fun and wasn't a business, you could track your favorite celebrities. But I got to tell you, if it were me, I'd turn it into a niche celebrity news site and make money on it. All right. Maybe punk rock news or something, you know? Of course, that wouldn't be one that I would run, but. But something that specific where people could come to hear all the stuff they're interested in. So how do you do it? Well, you go to Google.com/alerts. And make sure you're logged in to whatever Google account you want to be using, whatever Google email address is associated with. Then you got to go to your keyword research. And put those in. Then you got to say, well, how often do I want to get these alerts? Now I prefer to get them in real time.

[00:14:29] And of course, Alan, who I was talking to you about before, he really needs to jump on it. If there's an active shooter, he needs to be right there right now. So he gets him in real time. Or you can have them come once a day or once a week, whatever you pick. And then you got to choose your sources. Where do you want to pull these alerts from? I mean, just news or blogs or even from books, videos, you know, where do you want to get it from? Then you pick your language and you can choose your region. And then they'll even go to say only the best results or everything. So I don't know how they decide what's best for you or not. So I just pick everything and then select the email address you want to deliver to and then boom, you hit create alert and you're live. And I keep reminding you, you can have up to 1000. So don't hold back, but try to be very specific on what you want to get. Now, why do you use quotation marks? Well, quotation marks are used to get exact matches. It's called if I just put, let's say, public speaking, because I sell a lot of professional and public speaking stuff. Well, that would show up any result where the word public and the word speaking showed up on a page somewhere. But they weren't together necessarily.

[00:15:58] So if you put quotation marks around that, those two words have to be exactly right next to each other. Or the phrase that you're if it was public speaking tips, that phrase in quotation marks has to be exact. So that's why you use quotation marks. So you could put I could put Tom Antion with quotation marks because there's another guy named Antion that's some kind of singer out of Hawaii. I think that's his first name. There's some convicted felon. His first name is Antion. But anyway, I could put Tom Antion in quotation marks and then, I don't know, schmuck or something is another word. So. So. But I put Tom Antion. So any time my name shows up, I immediately get an alert of it. And yeah, I mean, it shows up quite a bit. And so I don't always follow up on everything, but at least I have the chance to do it. Oh, and by the way, the terms that you put are aren't case sensitive, so it's all lowercase. I mean, it doesn't matter what you put in. And I'm going to have a link in the show notes where you can go and Google will show you all the all the different ways to search so that you can be very precise. Here's a couple of them. You could put you could put a pound sign and then your hashtag in front of or whatever hashtag you're looking for, and it'll go search hashtags for you.

[00:17:31] If you put a minus sign, that means that let's say I was talking about John Roberts and let's say there's a John Roberts that's a plumbing distributor, but it's not John Roberts plumbing. So I could put John Roberts in quotation marks, the word plumbing, but then minus the word distributor, because I don't want to hear about the distribution channels and the plumbing. All right. So just something like that. But you put a minus on a word, you don't want to show up and it eliminates that from the results. So this is a really powerful, powerful tool that's totally for free. And you're kind of crazy if you're not using it, all right. Because it's just give you all kinds of information to help you sell more, to help you go after your competitors and beat them and see what they're doing to get publicity, to make hobby websites or news industry websites and just all this great stuff for free. All right. So there you go. Now, this is just one sliver of what you need to do to have a successful online business. And I'm the guy that'll show you how. I've got the longest running, most unique, most successful Internet and digital marketing mentor program ever. There's no question about it. You can call me up. I'll tell you all the unique features of it. Or you can just go to great Internet marketing training, CNN.com, and see a lot of them.

[00:19:02] But I'm just a crazy fanatic helping people in small businesses. I could have quit 20 years ago and. And made so much money doing this. So so check it out at greatInternetmarketingtraining.com. If you really want to get serious about your your online business or if you if you have a brick and mortar, you need to have an online part of that business because a lot of times that'll make more money for you with less risk and higher profit than your physical location. And you can bring in money from around the world if you consider yourself a local business. We'll teach you how to do that digitally. It's just a beautiful thing. So check it out. GreatInternetmarketingtraining.com. And we have just an entry fee and I don't get my big money like a lot of people. Try to charge you 50 or 100 grand up front to teach you this stuff, not me. I let you pay an entry fee, which I'll even finance for you. And I don't get my big money unless you make big money. So that's one of the reasons that's the most popular ever in this particular field. All right. That's my story. And I'm sticking to it. Go set up those Google alerts and take all the benefits to the bank. Catch you on the next episode. See you later.