Spy On Competitors Using Google In Your Niche Marketing

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Using this tool you can track what your customers and competitors are saying about you, your products, or services and even track an entire Niche Market

Have you ever wondered what your customers are saying about your products or services and wish you had a way to track this? If you have been building a business of any kind it’s likely you’ve asked yourself this question… but you’ve probably wondered how you could also track your competitors and keep track of what they are doing in your market.

Lets face it, staying on top of your niche markets and your competitors is vital if you are going to stay on top of your game, it’s also vital to have this information so that you can develop products or services that your customers say they want, even if they aren’t telling you directly what it is they say they need. I have been using this tool to track all of these things in the niche markets that interest me for quite some time now and the gems I am able to gather because of this knowledge just cannot be beat.

I’ve been contemplating whether or not I should reveal this information here simply because I will be arming not only your competitors with this same information, but also my own. Now if you’ve purchased any of our products you probably already have this knowledge, but for most, this very well could be a shocking little secret that you wished you knew about a long time ago.

Google’s Tools Rock!

If you’ve spent any time here on M3 then you know it’s no big secret that I love Google. Out of any other company out there, Google has been responsible for helping my businesses to grow more than any other and it’s due to the tools and data we are able to extract from this phenominal search engine and as you will soon see, this tool is just one of the many you should be using that’s within their aresenal.

The tool I’m referring to is called Google Alerts.

Now before you go hog wild and start creating a plethora of alerts, I highly recommend that you go get yourself a new GMail account specifically to track all of your alerts because it can easily stuff your inbox with more alerts than you can handle and I would hate to see you plug up your primary email address with all these alerts. So head over to Gmail and grab yourself a new email address.

Now that you have that all taken care of, let me show you what you can accomplish with this fantastic tool.

How Does Google Alerts Work?

There are currently 6 different search Types you can perform and they are ‘News’, ‘Web’, ‘Blogs’, ‘Comprehensive’, ‘Video’ and ‘Groups’. A brief explanation for these types of searches is below:

• A ‘News’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest news articles that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google News search.
• A ‘Web’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest web pages that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top twenty results of your Google Web search.
• A ‘Blogs’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest blog posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Blog search.
• A ‘Comprehensive’ alert is an aggregate of the latest results from multiple sources (News, Web and Blogs) into a single email to provide maximum coverage on the topic of your choice.
• A ‘Video’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest videos that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Video search.
• A ‘Groups’ alert is an email aggregate of new posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top fifty results of your Google Groups search.

There are also 3 different types of Alert Frequency and they are ‘As it Happens’, ‘Once a day’ or ‘Once a week’.

How Would I Use This Tool to Track a Niche, Competitor and/or Customer?

Lets say you have a business in the Dog Training Niche and you want to track what people are saying about your product. All you have to do is:

• Enter the Search phrase you want to track
• The Type of search you want to be alerted for
• The frequency of the Alerts
• The email address you want the Alerts to be sent to
• Click Create Alert

So for our Dog Training Niche let’s say you have a website called ‘www.GuardDogTraining.com’ and you have an ebook called ‘Pro Guard Dog Training’, you would create two alerts, one for ‘www.GuardDogTraining’ and another for ‘Pro Guard Dog Training’ and then you will receive an email from Google whenever the Googlebots find an instance of your alert phrase.

If you wanted to be really aggressive about your alerts, and you wanted to cover all of the possible options, you would actually have to create 3 alerts for each phrase, one using Comprehensive (which includes, News, Web and Blogs), another for Groups and lastly one for Video. This would give you an alert for every possible option within Google Alerts.

Now let’s think outside the box for a moment …You could even create an alert to cover what might be a possible product you might want to produce. For example, let’s say you wanted to see what people were saying about “dog has problem losing weight” and could create an alert of this phrase to not only see what people are saying about this particular phrase, but find out where they are posting this kind of information to get answers. Are they getting answers to their questions? If not, then you may have an area where a product needs to be created to provide a solution.

Granted, this is just an example, but I think you can start to see where you might be able to do some pretty creative data mining using this tool.

Please feel free to post how you are using the tool and whether it’s giving you useful information.

Talk to you soon,

Michael

Spy On Your Niche Competitors Using Google’s New Trend Tools

Give Your Niche Research a Huge Boost In Analyzing Your Competitions Customer Visitation and Search Habits

I’m a big fan of Niche Research, in fact, they don’t call me ‘That Son of a Niche’ for nothing! I do a lot of it and so tools like what Google has put together here are great time savers and provide very useful data. I have been using Google Trends for quite awhile now to do Niche Research, but they have just released some new functionality that will blow your mind and give you a massive boost in competing in any niche you may be involved in.

Trends for Websites

So what they have done, is added a section called ‘Trends for Websites‘

In this portion of Google Trends you can now type in URL’s of your competitors for example, and it will compare them, but what’s really powerful about this new functionality is that it allows you to see where your competitor’s customers are visiting and where they go once they get there.  This gives you an insight into how customers visiting a particular kind of site are navigating when looking for certain products and services.

This trend data is compiled from multiple sources and isn’t strictly from Google’s own search data and is aggregated from millions of users.  One other caveat for this new functionality within Google Trends for Websites is that not all websites can be searched using this new tool and is only going to work for sites that are currently getting significant traffic.

Head on over to Trends for Websites and follow along with what I’m going to describe here.

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