Using Google Search to prospect for sales leads is a well known sales technique, and when you add Google Alerts you can make sure that your searches will be run automatically and continuously. Every time Google finds a new page that matches one of your searches, the new sales lead is delivered right to your mailbox. Unfortunately, Google Alerts can overwhelm you with too many emails. AlertRank solves this problem with a free set of tools for managing your alerts and sharing them with others. This post will be the start of a multi-part series on using Google Alerts with AlertRank as a lead generation system. The result is super powerful, and completely free.
The basic idea behind AlertRank is that it evaluates your alerts before they reach you, and adds ranking information that tells you which are most important. It also collects the alerts in a simple Web interface that lets you manage and report on them.
Create an AlertRank Account
The first step is easy. Just go to the AlertRank signup page, and supply a username and password that you want to use. You also need to tell us your email address, so we can send the alerts along to you after processing them.
For this demonstration we’ll use the example of a restaurant supply company that wants to find sales leads for its line of professional grill products. The sales manager already has an email address of grillsupply@gmail.com, so this will be the ultimate destination for the Google Alerts. The AlertRank account will be called grillalerts. When the account is created, an email address is automatically set up called grillalerts@alertrank.com. The way this will work, is that we’ll tell Google Alerts to send email results to grillalerts@alertrank.com. AlertRank will process them, and send the improved emails to grillsupply@gmail.com. Once everything is in place, the sales manager can continue using his normal email system on Gmail to read the alerts. He’ll also be able to work with the alerts through the AlertRank website.
Create a Google Account
The easiest way to tell Google to send alerts to this new AlertRank account is to create an account on Google with the AlertRank email address. Google Alerts created in this account will go to AlertRank first, which will do all the work of annotating them and passing them along to the user’s mailbox.
Create the Google Alerts
Once we are logged into the new Google account, we can create the first set of alerts. One of the best ways to find sales leads for a business is to look for new businesses or ones that are renovating. There are many possible searches that could find leads, but we’ll start with three simple ones:
- (new OR opening) restaurant
- (renovate OR remodel) restaurant
- allinurl: restaurant contact
A single Google Alerts account allows you to have up to 1,000 different searches, so over time, we can add more to this list. This will be covered in later parts of this series of posts. If you aren’t familiar with Google Search syntax, I have a complete tutorial on creating alerts and the tricks of Google’s syntax available. Also, when you create an AlertRank account, I will send you a link to my e-book with even more Google Alerts tips.
Read your first AlertRank email
Here is the first email to be delivered in response to these searches. It looks similar to the type of email you would receive directly from Google Alerts, but Alertrank’s version has a number of improvements. The alerts all have an AlertRank quality score attached. This is a number from 0 to 10 that tells you how influential the source of this alert is. For example, an alert from The New York Times has a rank of 10, which means it’s highly influential, while an alert from a news paper in Prattville, Alabama has a rank of 5. The alerts are listed in order from highest to lowest rank. This lets you focus on the most valuable alerts first.
The quality score is mainly used for online marketing purposes. If you want to promote your services through commenting on the sites found by the alerts, it is important to know which ones have more influence and readers. Even if you aren’t going to post comments on these alerts, it is clear that a business that is written up in The New York Times is going to be a bigger potential customer.
Review alerts on the AlertRank website
The major benefits of using AlertRank become clear when you log into your account on the website. Each account has a complete management interface that collects the alerts, and lets you sort, search, and report on them.
The next installment in this series demonstrates how the AlertRank site gives you a tremendous amount of control over the lead generation process with Google Alerts.
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Hi Adam, ur posting is inspiring me. Thanks for info n keep on sharing