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Lead generation

Google Alerts for Sales Leads, Part 4: Alert Reports

by Adam Green on July 29, 2009

in AlertRank, Google Alerts, Lead generation, sales leads

This is the fourth 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 biggest weakness of Google Alerts as a lead generation tool is a total absence of reporting capabilities. The best you can do is forward individual emails, which is not a very effective way to share leads with your sales team. AlertRank adds a set of powerful Google alert reporting tools, including getting results as an Excel spreadsheet or PDF file.

Daily Excel summary

AlertRank automatically collects all the alerts you receive each 24 hours into an excel spreadsheet, and emails it to you every morning. Here is the spreadsheet I got this morning from the example grillalerts account.

leads4-excel

The nice thing about getting this as an Excel file is that you can easily delete items, or add notes to others before emailing it to the sales staff. You can also control which alerts appear in the spreadsheet, or turn off delivery completely with the delivery settings page.

leads4-excel2

Daily PDF summary

AlertRank also delivers a PDF version of the alerts from the previous 24 hours each morning by email. This is a convenient format for sharing the alerts with clients or investors. Each alert in the PDF file has a link to the original page found by Google. Here is today’s PDF report for the grillalerts account.

leads4-pdf

The PDF summary has its own delivery settings page that has the same controls as the one for the Excel summary. You can control which types of alerts are delivered, and turn off the delivery with this page.

Custom PDF reporting

If you want even more control over your reports, you can open the Alerts Listing page, and select the print to PDF option. When you combine this with all the sorting, searching and selection options this page provides, you can create a highly customized report.
leads4-print

Here is a sample PDF report I created by customizing the columns displayed, sorting the results on Google PageRank, and selecting only those alerts for the search term “(renovate OR remodel) restaurant”.

Now that you know how to manage alerts more effectively, the next post in this series gives you my favorite tips for finding local sales leads with Google Alerts.

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Publicize your Marketing Firm with a Twitter Press Release

by Adam Green on May 2, 2009

in Google Alerts, Lead generation, Marketing, Twitter

Twitter is all the rage with the Mainstream Media and leading blogs. They are eager for any details about Twitter adoption they can build a story around. You can take advantage of this phenomenon for your own company by creating a press release showing how the industry your firm serves is adopting Twitter as a marketing vehicle. This establishes you as a leading edge marketing company and a social media expert.

All you have to do is mine data from Twitter user profiles that you can craft into an easily repeated factoid. The secret to gathering data from Twitter profiles is this simple formula:
intext:”bio * [keyword]” site:twitter.com

Let’s say you work with hospitals to create social media campaigns. You can first determine the number of hospitals on Twitter with the Google search:
intext:”bio * hospital” site:twitter.com

This search currently returns 1,100 results, which can be the foundation of your release. Each of these search results will lead you to a Twitter account where you can gather additional data. You only need a reasonable sample to determine some useful statistic that can be turned into your factoid hook. This allows you to craft whatever message you need to present your case as a marketing firm that can help hospitals improve their social media presence.

If you find that the average follower count for hospitals is low, you can use the press release to announce your white paper on gaining more Twitter followers for hospitals. If you find a few hospitals with a high follower count, you can study their tweets and publish a white paper on the most effective uses of Twitter by hospitals.

Once you establish yourself as a Twitter expert for hospitals, you can create a Google Alert for this same search that will notify you whenever a new Twitter account is created with hospital in the bio. This will provide you with a steady source of leads for your marketing services.

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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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Attract qualified leads to your site with Google Alerts

April 28, 2009

Why do you think Adwords tied to Google search is so successful? Because it reaches people who are actively looking for your product or service. Google Alerts is better than Adwords for generating leads for two reasons: it’s free and it finds users who care so much about your keywords that they created a permanent [...]

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Powerful search patterns for local sales leads

April 7, 2009

Websites use common patterns for posting information, and once you learn how to match those patterns with Google Alerts, the leads start pouring in. Here’s one pattern I find really effective:
keyword site:domain.com inurl:location
As an example, lets say I’m looking for sushi restaurants to sell supplies to in the Boston area:
sushi site:craigslist.org inurl:boston
I can [...]

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