Did you know that Google will send you emails whenever your business is mentioned anywhere on the internet? Well, just about anywhere. And it’s free.
Here’s how to set up a Google Alert:
- Log into your Google account. If you don’t have one, get it. There are tons of useful and free applications available to you.
- Visit http://google.com/alerts
- Enter your company name within quotation marks, like so: “Company Name”
- Choose what type of content you’d like to be notified about: blogs, news articles, websites, videos, groups, or EVERYTHING. I usually go with everything.
- Choose how often you’d like to receive alert emails.
- Choose how many alerts each email will contain (20 or 50).
- Choose to have it emailed, or if you’d rather they’ll collect the results in an RSS feed you can follow using your RSS reader.
And that’s it! Any time your business is mentioned on the web, you’ll get a notice telling you about it. This is great for proactive customer service because you can find out when people are blogging about problems with your product, and address them directly. You may not always know if your company is mentioned in a news article, but with Google Alerts you can be prepared if a story about you is published and be ready for an influx of customers.
Are you using Google Alerts? Let us know how they’re helping you in the comments.
“I learn things that make me better at what I do. When you step out you often learn stuff that is so common to someone else and yet never would have crossed your silly little mind.” Lisa Barone in Business Insider
Ran across this great article today over at Business Insider. Lisa Barone describes nine things she’s learned after a year as an entrepreneur. One stood out to me: Seek out other opinions.
This does NOT come naturally to me as a business owner. I, like Lisa, know why I do things and am confident that it’s the best way. But by it’s nature, my brain doesn’t see it’s shortcomings. I don’t know what I don’t know.
So ask around. Learn to be curious about other people’s opinions. They may not change your mind, or they just may. Either way you’ll feel more confident and be a better business person.
Who do you find makes a good sounding board? Let us know in the comments.
“‘Curiouser and curiouser!’ cried Alice…” Lewis Carroll
So our theme for July is curiosity. As a business owner, it’s easy for me to get sucked into the necessary routines, like explaining how to reset your password for the thousandth time, and forget to wonder about the big things in life. Like why I can’t keep up with my keys or cell phone, but I’ve got a gas station receipt from 2003 in my car’s console.
But I digress. Curiosity in and of itself is a great quality—generally considered to be a key ingredient of genius. But for entrepreneurs, asking a lot of questions isn’t enough; you have to ask the right questions.
Here are a few tips to get you started:
1. Keep an open mind. Don’t dismiss any idea out of hand.
2. Assume the opposite of your opinion. If you think Twitter requires too much energy for not enough return, pretend that the investment was guaranteed to be worth it. How would you work tweeting into your day? What sort of information would you share?
3. Ask irrelevant questions. Sometimes insight comes from unexpected places.
4. Remove labels. Words like trendy, boring and complicated carry assumptions that may or may not be true. Don’t let assumptions get in the way of knowledge.
Curious about Strong Elixir? Ask us anything you want over in the sidebar. Or tell us in the comments what you’re curious about these days.
