SUMMARY BY CHATGPT

In this episode, Tom Antion introduces listeners to Google Alerts, a free service that allows users to receive email notifications when selected keywords (such as names, companies, or topics) appear in search results or news. He emphasizes its value for entrepreneurs, marketers, and communicators and shares several practical business uses, including:
Key Uses of Google Alerts:
1. Reputation Management – Get notified of mentions of your name or company to respond quickly to negative reviews or comments.
2. Industry Trends – Stay updated on shifts in your market or products.
3. Competitor Monitoring – Track competitor activities, news, and press releases.
4. Brand Monitoring – See how your brand is showing up online—positively or negatively—and identify new promotional opportunities.
5. Content Ideas – Discover trending topics in your niche to create timely and relevant content.
6. Link Building – Learn where competitors are getting backlinks and seek similar opportunities.
7. Media & Publicity – Use alerts to capitalize on current news (“newsjacking”) and position yourself as an expert for interviews or features.
Anecdote:
Tom shares a story about speaking for Hallmark Cards. By using Google Alerts to monitor greeting card industry news, he impressed corporate executives with up-to-date info none of them knew—making him look exceptionally well-informed.
Final Thoughts:
Tom calls Google Alerts a "no-brainer" tool and encourages listeners to sign up immediately. He also plugs his automation e-book (v3.0), Amazon Influencer updates, mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com, and his online school at IMTCVA.org, which is licensed in Virginia but open to distance learners.

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Episode 1006 – Google Alerts
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 1006 of Screw the Podcast. Today we're going to talk about a service totally free that I've been using for many, many years called Google Alerts, and also tell you my favorite story about it, how I had executives from a big corporation almost bowing to me because they couldn't believe how I knew stuff they didn't know. And it all came from Google Alerts. Okay, hope you didn't miss episode 1005. That was the Amazon Influencer program, and since I did that episode, I finally passed the hurdle to get all approved for that to make money doing reviews for Amazon. Getting you can get free products and you can sell them after you review them. It means a lot of a lot of good side hustle money going to come from that. Let's see. Pick up a copy of our automation e-book. Version 3.0 is out and if you have 2.0 throw it away and get 3.0. And check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com and my school at IMTCVA.org, where you will save hundreds of thousands of dollars rather than going to some stupid four year college and come out and compete for a job at Starbucks. So there you go.

[00:01:46] All right. Google alerts. Well, what is it? Well, it's a free service from Google where you can put in keywords and names and things, and it will send you an email when those things come up in searches and in news.

[00:02:02] And you can pick how often you want to be alerted. You can do just on right away as soon as that comes up. Or daily or weekly. I think you can pick it. But I'm going to give you some of the ways you use this in business. And you're just again, it's one of those things you're crazy to not do it because it's totally free. And it gives you all this information and, and things that I'm going to go over now. Okay. So one of the things, if you put your own name in there and your own company name, it's part of your efforts towards reputation management. You get an alert that, hey, somebody just put up a review, a bad review about you, or a bad comment about you. Well, it's a good thing to know about that, wouldn't you say? All right. So so, uh, then you can respond to it immediately rather than letting it fester. And thousands more people see it with no response from you, things like that. So that's part of reputation management. Another thing is industry trends. If you start putting your industry and your product line and things like that in there, you'll start seeing what's going on in the industry with regard to those products. Are they going up or are they going down? Are they neutral or are they going to get tariffs? I mean, all kinds of things like that.

[00:03:27] So industry trends and then competitor monitoring is very important to know what are my competitors doing. What press releases have they put out. What mentions of them in the media. Can I capitalize on either good or bad? If you get some negative thing about them comes up in the major news, well, you'd want to strategically put that into your promotion for your products and services to scare people from dealing with your competitors. All right. As long as it's honest stuff. All right. You know, I'm not saying to to make stuff up or to plant stuff, but if it's out there already and somebody else is saying it. Then you use it to your advantage. Going along with reputation management, as we call it, brand monitoring. How is your brand or your name showing up in the world? If it's showing up, great. Maybe you'll see places where you can make it even greater. If it's showing up bad, maybe you can go there and try to knock down some of the negative negativity about you. Or maybe you get ideas to where the type of place that it's showing up you never thought of. And so you go to more of those types of places and put content in, or whatever it takes to increase that particular brand opportunity.

[00:04:52] Okay. Content ideas. This is another thing you can get. Oh gee, look at all these things that are coming up with regard to my topic area that people were wondering about. And so I can make a product about that. Say or make content about that to distribute online. You can even use it for link building. Let's say you get a bunch of competitors coming up because they were linked from a certain source. You might say, oh, I never thought about going to that source and getting a link or providing them with some content for more than just a link. A lot of times when you get a link, you also get the benefit of the content being seen by their other people's traffic. See, this is a very powerful thing that, like I said, you're kind of crazy if you just don't go get a free account and you probably have a Google account already. Just sign up for the alerts and just put some stuff in there and just see what happens. And I think you'll be quite surprised that the kind of information it can give you to keep up with things that are going on in the world, especially if you're in the media at all. See, uh, I interviewed a guy one time, David. I think it's David. David Scott and he he coined the term news jacking, which is kind of a publicity technique where it's easier to get on the media for free publicity if something's already in the media.

[00:06:22] And so Google Alerts can, can help you with that. I had a buddy that is a safety expert, you know, self-defense expert and so forth and was representing a product for that. And so he just would put in like, you know, any kind of crime thing. And when it would come up like a murder or something, it would say what city it was. And then he could go to that city virtually, not just drive there or fly there, and then present himself as an expert on self-defense and get on the media say. So. That's a way to use it. But I'll just tell you before we go here on my favorite story about this, I was doing a speech for Hallmark Cards, and I had when I landed the speech, I put all kinds of greeting cards, terms and hallmark and things in Google Alerts. Oh, and by the way, this used to cost as a service long before Google was around, I forget. The CompuServe, I think, had a paid service that did this. I even used it back then. That's how long I've been using it. So anyway, I put all these things in and then that helped me develop my speech for for hallmark.

[00:07:38] And then the morning before I went down to the speech, I thought, I'll just check my Google alerts one more time. And I found out something that had just hit the day before, or even I don't even maybe even that day, I can't remember. And then I incorporated into my speech and those executives, it was like their tongues were, you know, their chins were hitting their seats, you know, like, how's this guy know this? You know, they thought I was. I'm not even one of them. Somebody better than them because they didn't know. None of these executives knew this. And I did say, and I came from Google Alerts. So that was a powerful thing to have. If you're a speaker or any kind of communicator to know stuff immediately and you be the ones to tell somebody else about it, then you look like the genius. All right. So anyway, uh, go sign up for Google Alerts right after you check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com. And my school at IMTCVA.org, it's licensed operate by the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. It's the only one in the country dedicated to this topic. And you don't have to live in Virginia because it's distance learning. All right. So check it out. IMTCVA.org and I will catch you on the next episode. See you later.