How to Track Your Business Growth in a Quick 2 Minutes

There’s not many things you can do for your business that will take less than 2 minutes and will give you results 365 days a year. But this one is a sure fire way how to track your business growth quickly. Its called Google Alerts, and every business owner (and everyone for that matter) should be using it. This simple and free tool scans the web for any keyword you want and will automatically send you results via email.

We all know its important to monitor your reputation. You’ve probably done a search on yourself or your business at some point, right? If you have guidance from a public relations expert, you probably know keeping up on news is a daily task. The good news is with a little effort you can put this task on auto-pilot. Just set it and forget it!

Here’s how to track your business growth with Google Alerts:

1. Sign in to your Google account.
2. Go to the Google Alerts page here: https://www.google.com/alerts
3. Enter any keyword and click Create.
   – Alert options include how often you want to receive the alert, the sources, region, language, and delivery email address.

Here’s good Google Alert ideas to track your business growth:

• Your name and variations of your name
• Business name or website
• Product or service name
• Competitor names and products or services
• Areas of expertise

Here’s how to write a great keyword:

Did you know simply writing a phrase isn’t going to provide you with an exact match? You’ll get all sorts of results that simply contain those words. Sometimes that’s great, but when it’s not, use these operations.

• Use quotation marks for an exact match: “this will be exact”
• Use a minus sign to remove a word from results: this -that
• Use a plus sign to add a word to results: “this” + “that”

I have no less than 99 alerts flooding my Inbox on the daily. It’s full of Google Alerts to track businesses and clients along with all their topics. Last year, I even had an alert created for “Shark Vacuum” + “Black Friday”. And, yes I got that vacuum on sale! It’s a lot so I created a filter to let them skip the Inbox and go straight into their own folder. It collects them nice and neat for easy keeping.

Here’s how to create a Gmail filter to organize your Google Alerts:

1. Login to your Gmail account.
2. Find a Google Alert email and select it by checking the checkbox next to it.
3. Go up to the More button located across the top of your emails and click the dropdown, and select “Filter Messages like These”.
4. Click the “Create Filter for These Messages” at the bottom right corner.
5. Choose your options and click Create Fliter.
   – I like “Skip the Inbox” and “Apply the Label” options. Creating a label is easy (just write one in the field provided) and it will keeps things tidy on the right side of your Inbox.

What are your favorite quick business tips? Leave a comment. I’d love to hear about them!