AlertRank is now a free site

by Adam Green on June 29, 2009

in AlertRank, Announcements, Autotweet, Google Alerts

I’ve been quiet on this blog for a while, because we’ve been making a lot of changes to the company and sites. The first big change is turning AlertRank into a free site. The site still supports up to 1,000 search terms per account, and you are free to create any number of accounts. Alerts are delivered by email with a full set of ranking information as soon as they are received from Google, and you can also get them summarized daily in Excel or PDF format. My favorite feature is auto-tweeting the highest ranked alerts to Twitter. Since you can create multiple AlertRank accounts, you can have different Google Alerts search terms go to different Twitter accounts. It is a great marketing tool.

We have a lot of improvements planned for AlertRank, and even though it is free, it will continue to grow in response to user requests. So check it out, and let me know if you want anything else added.

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The secret to getting listed in Google Alerts

by Adam Green on June 11, 2009

in Blog commenting, Google Alerts

People are always asking how to get their site listed in Google Alerts. The answer is simple, just comment on those sites that you find with Google Alerts. Google doesn’t send alerts for every mention of a search term. It only delivers results from sources it considers authoritative for these words. It isn’t as simple as PageRank, since that is a measurement of the site’s overall influence. You can get alerts from sites with a wide range of PageRank, but they all are sites that Google feels are important for that specific search term.

All you have to do is follow Google’s advice and focus your blog commenting on those sites that you get in Google Alerts. If Google sees links to your pages from these sites, it will assume that you too are authoritative for these keywords. Repeat this often enough, and soon you’ll also be showing up in Google Alerts.

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Tracking mentions of your name with Google Alerts is not enough

by Adam Green on June 11, 2009

in Conversation, Google Alerts

It is part of my job to read blog mentions of Google Alerts all day, and the same message keeps getting repeated: “Be sure to set up Google Alerts for your company and product names.” Sure that is important, but are you missing the most important part of the online conversation this way? When you meet people do you wait until they ask a question that is specifically about you before you say anything? Hopefully not. You need to listen to what people are interested in, and *join* them on this common ground. That’s the difference between a conversation and a response.

The same thing applies to social media monitoring with Google Alerts. Along with tracking your company and product names, you should also have alerts for any common terms in your industry, and breaking news events that will affect your customers. These will give you the opportunity to be a participant in social media, rather than being just an observer.

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Reviving a political campaign with AlertRank

by Adam Green on June 10, 2009

in AlertRank, Google Alerts, Political campaign, Politics

I started a public Google Alerts account for Merrick Alpert the day he announced that he was running against Connecticut’s Senator Chris Dodd in the Democratic primary. Since then it doesn’t look like he is generating a lot of attention. This is a comparison of overall mentions of Dodd vs. Alpert on the AlertRank analytics page.

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Alpert got a good bounce when he announced, but his rate of mentions have declined since, and the last week has been pretty much flatlined. I plan on exploring Alpert’s current online visibility, and putting together a plan for generating a little more buzz. This will take more work than I can cover in one blog post, so I’m going to make this my focus for the rest of this week.

Let’s start by taking a closer look at the overall picture. The analytics page displays a summary of the total and daily average rate of mentions for all the current Google Alerts in this account. By clicking the total mention column, we can order them from highest to lowest to see how Dodd mentions compare to those for Alpert.

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It looks like Dodd is getting about 5 times more mentions each than Alpert, So there is a lot of work to be done. In the next post we’ll analyze the sources of these alerts and see if there are some good sites for the Alpert people to run a commenting campaign.

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The value of automatic tweeting from Google Alerts

by Adam Green on June 5, 2009

in AlertRank, Google Alerts, Marketing, Twitter

It’s been 2 months since I started testing the idea of automatically sending selected Google Alerts to a Twitter account, and the results are pretty remarkable. The Twitter account for @marketing_alert has attracted over 1,500 followers.

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When I created the account, I deliberately made it as clear as possible that this was an automatic process, and not a real human running the account. I used the default avatar, used an account name that explained the purpose, followed nobody from this account, and stated in the bio that the tweets were automatic. I’m sure that if I had adopted a persona by using the name and picture of a real person, the number of followers would have been much greater.

So what is the value of this experiment? It shows that by simply auto-tweeting about a specific subject you can attract followers interested in learning more. 1,570 followers may not seem like much compared to the millions promised by the various pyramid schemes being promoted, but these followers are all self-selected. They want to learn more about this topic. It is the ultimate opt-in lead list. The pyramid schemes are all based on the existence of auto-follow bots on many accounts. If you follow millions of people, a high percentage will auto-follow back, but what is the value of this completely non-qualified list? Bulk growth of Twitter accounts is so early 2009. The real key to Twitter marketing with be opt-in lists like this one.

If you use this technique, you can grow a list of engaged followers, and then add whatever messages you want to the account. It isn’t spam, because everyone on the list asked to be there. Let’s say you are a band that wants to build a list of followers interested in your type of music. Just auto-tweet the appropriate alerts, and then add offers for your CDs at regular intervals. The same idea can be applied to all types of ecommerce.

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