No matter how well you’re doing in your business, you need to keep a sharp eye out for what’s happening in your marketplace. You could be yesterday’s flavor of the month if you don’t.
No. Wait. Scratch that.
You WILL be old news if you don’t know what your competitors are up to.
So how exactly do you keep track of your competitors?
Well, the first thing is to draw up a list of who your competitors really are. For the sake of this discussion, let’s define a competitor as someone who’s selling similar products to yours in the same market.
Go to Google Alerts and type in alerts for:
- the names of your competitors
- their company names
- any relevant product names
- any job titles with location (e.g. Business Coach New York etc)
You can also add Google Alerts for general news and trends in your market, using whatever alert terms make sense in your business.
In my line of business, I like to keep up with small business marketing, work from home topics and anything connected to entrepreneurs so I make sure that all hits my Inbox once a day.
Google Alerts allows you to specify what kind of information you want to be notified about, and how often. I get a daily Alert for each of my topics and I almost always ask for everything to be included – which means any mention of that item in news, blogs, video, discussion groups and more.
It’s important to select the option for “Only the Best Results” unless you want to be inundated with endless alerts which will just suck up your time for minimal results.
Do make sure that you add new alerts as necessary. So, if your competitor is putting out a new eBook called “How to Draw Purple Giraffes”, you want to immediately add an alert for that. Then, when you get the alert summary in your email, you can quickly skim the headlines and glean a lot of useful information – the kind of information that can help you promote your business better.
