Free Tool to legally and ethically follow anything on the internet you like

Welcome to another edition of the Expand the Business Podcast. I am your host Casey Eberhart and, in this episode, we will examine a free tool that will allow you to legally and ethically follow anything on the internet you like. 

This tool is called Google Alerts and when used properly it can keep you up to date on important concepts, topics, and mentions for your brand and business. 

Listen to the full episode to learn all the applications of Google Alerts for your business.

Be sure to visit http://expandthebusiness.com/ to learn more and when you enter your contact details, we will send you out several goodies as a welcome bonus.

Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to the Expand the Business Podcast where ever you listen to the show. Your reviews help us to spread the word and expand on our audience for the show. Thanks for listening.

Episode Transcript Below:

Casey Eberhart: Well, good morning, evening, afternoon, wherever you are in the world. I want to welcome you to a short form version of expandthebusiness.com. So if you are into podcasting and listening to podcasts, please check out Expand the Business wherever you download your podcasting. And if you want some free goodies, head over to expandthebusiness.com. We've got some great freebies over there, some great goodies for you over there. And again that is at expandthebusiness.com.

Casey Eberhart: Hello everybody, my name is Casey Eberhart, hailing from Los Angeles, California. And it is my pleasure and honor to hang out with you a little bit today and just talk about one of the tools that you can use in your arsenal of tools to grow and expand your business.

Casey Eberhart: So today I want to talk to you about a simple, easy tool that is free, favorite four-letter word that will allow you to essentially spy on legally and ethically anything going on all over the Internet in real time. Well, almost real time. Maybe about a 12-hour lag. So here is the tool.

Casey Eberhart: The tool and the resource are Google Alerts. So Google Alerts are simply a tool that allows you to put in key words, competitors' names, things like that. And it will send you an email every single day or weekly, combined with everything that came out on the Internet the previous day.

Casey Eberhart: So we actually made a list of things that we use Google Alerts for across our portfolio of businesses. And so let's just go through the things that you can use Google Alerts for to spy on your competition, to spy on your own business. I hate the word spy, but it allows you to take a peak in what's being put on the Internet about whatever topic you want.

Casey Eberhart: So for example, if you are going to write a blog post or you want to see when your blog post shows up on Google or shows up on the Internet, you might put the keywords for your article. I one time did a blog post on creating a thank you note after a job interview. So what I did was I set up a Google Alert to go in and say, "Thank you card after interview," and I was able to see when that article actually hit Google two or three days later simply because I had already set up a Google Alert for that.

Casey Eberhart: You could put in your hobbies in Google Alerts. So if your hobby is beekeeping, you could put in beekeeping and every day Google will send you an email that says, "Hey, here are all the new things that happened on the Internet today about beekeeping," and you could do that for any hobby. Paddleboarding, beekeeping, Harley Davidson's, whatever your hobby is, you could put that in a Google Alert.

Casey Eberhart: Then next up, if you are a speaker, trainer, or coach, you could use Google Alerts to generate leads for your business. Let me give you an example. As a speaker, one of the Google Alerts I have set up for myself is 'Call for Speakers'. Okay? Because in the association world, a lot of times when people are looking for speakers, they'll do a post and they'll say, "Hey, we're doing a generic call for this type of speaker in this type of profession," and I'll get those alerts in real time. So by the time somebody else spends a month or two searching Google for all of those, we get those in real time. It saves you massive amounts of time.

Casey Eberhart: You can set up Google Alerts for specific companies. So we do this if we are looking at making an investment in a company, we'll set up a Google Alert ahead of time so we see what's being posted about that company in real time over the course of the due diligence period for that.

Casey Eberhart: If you're in a network marketing organization, you could actually put your own company or the company that you represent in Google Alerts as well and you'll be able to see what is being written about that company or videos that are being created. Anything that's coming into Google in real time, simply a day behind.

Casey Eberhart: If you are an investor and you are investing in a particular type of investment, it might be good for you to use Google Alerts to save you time here as well. For example, let's say you wanted to start investing in Bitcoin. You didn't understand Bitcoin, you didn't understand how it's utilized, how the investment outside of it works. You could go simply create a Google Alerts on Bitcoin and every article and video that's created that day would be emailed to you the following day. So any type of investment idea.

Casey Eberhart: Two last ideas on how to use Google Alerts are number one, your competition. You can simply go into Google Alerts, type in your competitors' names, and anything that's presented on the Internet the day before would again get emailed you the next day. So if you are a local plumber for example, and your competitor is just down the street and you want to see what Yelp reviews are written, what other type of reviews are written, those types of things, you would simply created a Google Alert for your competitor and you could do that for all types of competitors or things or people that you wanted to sort of see what's being written about.

Casey Eberhart: And finally, this is key and critical and so super important. You want to create a Google Alert for yourself, for your own name. And the reason you want to be able to do that is because it catches anything both good or maybe not so good in literally almost real time. So many times people have no idea what's actually being written about them on the Internet. That a simple Google Alert would allow you to not have to go back to Google and search your name or search different things. It simply allows you to tell Google what you'd like to be notified when new things occur and it will simply send you that email once a day or once a week. It can do it in real time. It's very, very flexible.

Casey Eberhart: So in order to do that, you just go to Google and type in Google Alerts. There's a bazillion things. It's absolutely simple and easy to set up and it will save you massive amounts of time. If you are a business owner looking to save time and/or make more money in your business, I highly recommend that you head over to expandthebusiness.com, grab your name and email or put your name and email inside that little box there. We'll send you out some goodies. We've got some special surprises that we work with over there. So again, if you want to save time and make more money in your business, head over to expandthebusiness.com and we'll get you all set up.

Casey Eberhart: So with that, I hope you've enjoyed this episode of Expand the Business where we help entrepreneurs do the two things that almost all entrepreneurs are always looking to do, which is save time and/or make more money. So with that, I hope you have an absolutely amazing day. Now, let's go out and give somebody else an absolutely awesome day.