Few days ago, I post an article about “10 Google programs to operate your small business for FREE“. I would like to cover more about how I use Google Alerts to move my competitions out of my way.

It’s difficult to do online business without knowing what your competitors are doing. Especially, if you have an online store selling products, you need to know who is selling the same items as you do on the internet. You need to find out a lot of information about your competitors. Basically, you need to know the followings.

1. Your competitor just update their web site
2. Any news about your competitors
3. Any blog entries talking about you or your competitors
4. Any complaints about you or your competitors
5. Any press release your competitors recently published
6. Any product review about what you and your competitors are both selling

Google Alerts do all those for you. First, you will need to have a Gmail account that can receive alerts sent by Google. I use Thunderbird to receive Google Alerts email. Once you sign in to Google Alert, you have option to create as many alerts as you wish. I simply enter my competitors domain name or company name as keywords and choose “Comprehensive” as type and choose “as-it-happens” as how often. Save the alert. Now all you have to is wait and check your email box.

In less than an hour, I received an email with about 20 links related to my competitors. The links includes my competitor’s newly updated web site, few blog links about their products and services. Their myspace page update and most importantly the complaints on complaints.com and rating on bizrate.com. WOW. Now I know how many customers were complaining their services. I would read through those post and make sure I don’t do the same to my customers.

To be able to act professionally before my competitors knowing what I am up to is important. So I also create a new alerts that is searching for my own company name and web site domain. I can definitely see that I have less alerts. Is it a good thing? Well. It depends. I find there is no complaints so far, while I am smaller than my competitors. That is good things. However, I find what I am lacking of. I now know what I have to improve to competitor with them and find my target customers.

Although Google Alerts gives you many information about news, blog, and updated web pages, it doesn’t give you more information you might want to know. For example, it doesn’t give you any information about eBay, where your competitors are also selling stuff on. It doesn’t give you update on the products list on Google’s Product search (Froogle.com).

So what should I do? I go to eBay and setup a watch list against my competitor’s eBay ID. I bookmark the link and check everyday and see what they are up to. I go to Google Product database and subscribe my competitor’s products list.

I believe marketing your business is important, but knowing how your competitors market themselves is also important. I am hoping to find a better way to aggregate all this information to a mass RSS feed, so I can do everything in one place.

Popularity: 3%