Small business PR and marketing

 Small businesses do not have the budgets to pay a media monitoring service to track their coverage in the media. I encourage my clients to use Google Alerts – and I have one for each of my clients so I can track their coverage. Obviously this only applies to coverage that has been posted online so don’t rely on this to track coverage in trade publications.

Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.

• Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:
  monitoring a developing news story
  keeping current on a competitor or industry
  tracking stories in other blogs
  tracking stories/topics in your industries

To create a Google Alert:
Go to www.google.com/alerts
Fill in the ‘form’ by adding your search terms. The Type dropdown let’s you choose from News, Blogs, Web, Google Groups, and Comprehensive. The Comprehensive option will search all options – which is what I use.
Select how Often you wish to receive the alerts -  Once a day, as-it-happens, or once a week.
Hit Create Alert and you’ll start receiving emails with your alerts!