I’ve written before about using Google Alerts to spy on your competition and to find out what others are saying about you and your clients. Every day I get an email alert with links to articles and posts that mention my name and the key words I target in my marketing. I get to see what others are saying about me or my market and get ideas for articles.

I just found out that when it comes to Google Alerts, I’m a piker.

This excellent post provides a roundup of different ways the author uses alerts to leverage his brand (his name and business), authority, traffic and sales. Thanks to this, I see so much more I can do.

For example, although I have an alert for my name, I never considered adding one with variations of my name. The same goes for my web sites. I could be missing mentions that don’t get the name just right, but I will now.

I also like his suggestion for monitoring questions in your niche. “You can monitor your niche for a range of question based terms and then jump in and provide an expert answer with a link back to your site,” he says.

An estate planning attorney could create alerts for “Why * living trust”, “How * avoid probate”, or “Does * avoid estate taxes”, for example. The author says, “Every time I create a new piece of content that answers questions about a certain topic I setup corresponding alerts so I can direct people to the answer.”

Nice.

The author has suggestions for using alerts to monitor mentions about your content, finding new guest post and link building opportunities, monitoring your site’s security. and discovering new niches.

The author challenges you to be creative in how you use alerts. Okay, here’s an idea: let’s say our estate planning attorney would like to network with CPA’s who represent small businesses in his or her local market. Our estate planner could create an alert that notifies them when a CPA in their market posts new content with appropriate key words. Our estate planner could then contact the CPA to compliment them, promote their content, and invite them to lunch.

I like that you don’t have to be tech savvy to use google alerts, nor do you have to let them overwhelm you. You can set up alerts for daily or weekly notification, and have those results delivered via email, RSS.

Check out The Ninjas Guide to Google Alerts and tell me how you use (or plan to use) Google Alerts in your practice.

Here’s an alert for you: The Attorney Marketing Formula shows you how to get more clients and increase your income.