If you are in a business where you need to know what your competition is up to, you need to keep on top of the latest developments and technology advances, or you just want to know what’s going on in the Industry, google have two great tools for you. They are free, of course, easy to use and most people don’t know about them.
It’s google reader and google alerts. Sitepronews has written an article on how google reader and google alerts can help your Internet business. Google reader is a web-based RSS reader. And if you’ve never used it, today’s video from common craft, google reader in plain english, gives you a short introduction. It’s very easy to use. You add a subscription, and the latest news or articles from your favourite blogs show up in your reader as soon as they are published. So, you decide what you want to know about, and it comes to you. It’s as easy as checking your email.
Google alerts are even more useful. You can set up alerts from google reader. Decide what you want to know about; suppose you need to know when anything is published about ‘buggies’, because you run an online buggy store. Subscribe to a google alert using the keyword ‘buggy’ and any video, website, blog or news site item that mentions the word is fed to either google reader or your email. You may find that you have too much data with only one keyword, in which case you’ll need to experiment with the keyword phrase. But it’s great intelligence and it comes to you, you don’t have to search for it.
With google reader and google alerts you can be the font of all knowledge.
