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Google Alerts for Sales Leads, Part 5: Top sources of local sales leads

by Adam Green on July 30, 2009

in AlertRank, Google Alerts, Lead generation, sales, sales leads, sales prospecting

This is the fifth installment in a series of blog posts on generating sales leads with Google Alerts. If you missed the first post in this series, you can find it here.

I’ve spent the last few posts in this series focusing on the mechanics of managing sales lead alerts with AlertRank. Now I thought I’d switch gears and make some suggestions on search terms for finding local sales leads. Here are ten of my favorite techniques to deliver more alerts and more relevant results.

1. Google News alerts can be targeted to a specific, local news source, like a newspaper or TV station with the source: operator. You must set the alert type to News. The key is replacing spaces in the source’s name with underscores.
new restaurant source:boston_globe

2. The location: operator is another Google News alert option. This will work with a city, state, or country name. Again, put underscores where there are spaces in the name.
new restaurant location:los_angeles

3. This one is so obvious that people often miss it. You can add a zipcode to a Web search, and get a lot of highly specific results. Don’t be misled into thinking that Google “knows” the zipcode of every story. It is just matching the numbers in the zipcode to pages that have that value in the text, but since stories about businesses often include the address, it can be very effective. I would include this type of search in addition to your other alerts to see if it picks up something extra.
new restaurant 90210

4. The site: operator lets you specify parts of a domain name, which leads to a useful trick for finding items about US state agencies. They generally use the pattern of [state].gov in their domain names. This also finds local municipalities, because they often have domain names with [city].[state].gov.
new restaurant site:ca.gov
new restaurant site:sunnyvale.ca.gov

5. When you start searching government sites for leads, you’ll quickly realize that a lot of official notices are posted online in PDF format. You can use the filetype: operator to get alerts on these.
new restaurant permit filetype:pdf

6. If you use Twitter for marketing, you’ll always be looking for new people to follow. Google Alerts can notify you when a new profile is created with your keywords and desired location.
intext:”bio * restaurant” intext:”location * florida” site:twitter.com

7. Most people don’t think of Flickr as a site for finding sales leads, but it is actually great for local leads, because people often identify the location in the photo’s description. You can also follow people on Flickr, and get a steady stream of leads for topics they are interested in.
new restaurant dallas site:flickr.com

8. Craigslist is another great source of local leads, as long as you know how to find pages for your location. The pattern to look for is site:craigslist.org inurl:[city]. The best thing about Craigslist alerts that they usually have to do with economic activity, such as hiring, which is a great sign that this is a hot lead.
new restaurant site:craigslist.org inurl:boston

9. Review sites will also deliver good local leads, and I’ve had great results with Yelp.com. This site likes to put the location in the title of the review, so that is where you should look for it with the intitle: operator.
new restaurant intitle:”san francisco” site:yelp.com

10. When it comes to B2B sales leads, Linkedin.com can’t be beat. This is the best place I’ve found for leads to local trade associations and consultants.
restaurant california site:linkedin.com

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Google Alerts for Sales Leads, Part 3: Managing Multiple Alerts

by Adam Green on July 28, 2009

in AlertRank, Google Alerts, Lead generation, sales, sales leads, sales prospecting

This is the third installment in a series of blog posts on generating sales leads with Google Alerts. If you missed the first post in this series, you can find it here.

Managing multiple Google Alerts effectively is the key to extracting the best sales leads from the results Google sends you. AlertRank is designed to take over this management process from your email program. This post will cover the major features of the alerts listing page, where you will spend most of your time when using the site.

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Search within your alerts
You can create highly specific search terms when you create your alerts, but then you could miss a lot of results. I find it better to create general searches, and then use the search within AlertRank to pull out the results I need. For example, instead of creating alerts for different cities, I created general alerts on new and remodeled restaurants. Now that I have the alerts, I can search for any city I want to work with. This is not going back to Google for the search. It’s just selecting the matching items within the alerts I have received.

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Select by date
By default, AlertRank shows you all the alerts for the last 30 days, sorted with the most recent first. You can click on the date control to isolate a specific range of alerts by date.

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Select by alert properties
When you click on the settings control, you get a wide range of selection options. You can choose just those alerts that came from Google News, allow commenting, and have a minimum Alertrank quality score, among other options.

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These choices can be combined with a date range and search to let you pull out exactly the sales leads you need.

Custom column display
The alerts listing displays the most commonly used properties of each alert, but you can click the Customize Columns link to display a list of additional columns you want to see.

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This choice of columns will become your new default, and will be shown whenever you use the site.

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You can hide any of these columns with the same pulldown menu, and also set the display back to the original column settings.

Sort by alert properties
The listing is normally sorted by date received, but if you click any column heading, the list will be sorted by that column. Clicking the heading again reverses the order. I like to sort the alerts by the AlertRank quality score, so I can see the most important alerts at the top.

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Setting the sentiment for each alert
The first column in the alerts listing is used to display the sentiment rating for each alert. This allows you to rate the alerts as positive or negative. This is done by clicking within this column. Some monitoring products try to judge the sentiment for you through textual analysis, but that generally depends on simplistic searches for words like “love” and “hate.” We explored this idea when building AlertRank, but soon realized that this doesn’t give the user enough control. When it comes to sales leads, you know best how to decide whether an alert is good or bad for your business. So you make the choice, and then as we’ll see later, AlertRank uses the setting in many ways.

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Recording the alerts you’ve read
AlertRank knows which alerts you’ve read, just like an email program or feed reader.

leads3-unread

It keeps track of when you click an alert to view its page, and then removes the bold face from the alert’s title to tell you that you’ve read this.

leads3-read

You can use the settings panel at any time to select just those alerts that you haven’t read. You can also reset the read status, if you want to keep this alert with the ones you haven’t read yet.

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Deleting alerts
You can delete alerts individually, or select multiple alerts and delete them all at once.

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The alerts trash listing will retain all the deleted alerts, so you can review them, and restore any that you change your mind about.

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Learn how to share all the alerts you find with AlertRank in the next post in this series.

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Google Alerts for Sales Leads, Part 2: Stopping Email Overload

July 27, 2009

This is the second installment in a series of blog posts on generating sales leads with Google Alerts. If you missed the first post in this series, you can find it here.
The catch-22 of Google Alerts is that the more results they deliver, the more they get in the way. This sample account is [...]

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Google Alerts for Sales Leads, Part 1: Create Alerts

July 27, 2009

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 [...]

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Deliver Google Alerts leads to your sales team

April 28, 2009

Most people think of Google Alerts as a personal tool, but you can also use it to collect leads and share them with your sales team. AlertRank has a daily Excel digest that collects all of your alerts and emails them as a convenient package at the start of your business day. You can forward [...]

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