I have been using Google Alerts for quite a while now but only recently have realized that I am truly addicted to them.
For those of you who do not know, Google Alerts allow you to specify any term and will send you an email notification as soon as any web site publishes new content with that term. You can set up to receive these notifications weekly, daily, or as soon as they happen.
As an Internet marketer, I must stay on top of what is happening on the Internet and especially any discussion about me, my site, or topics I cover.
With Google alerts, I do not have to sit and press the refresh button on my browser 50 times a day to see if any new content I care about has appeared on the Internet. I get notified, fairly quickly, about this content via email by Google.
This is the "Push" technology from the 1990's done right. If any of you link to this story, mention my name or my site, I will be notified. I will visit your site and read your post. I am quite likely to leave you a "thank you" comment. You will also be on my radar screen and I may subscribe to your feed.
As many of you know, I launched a new service recently by which I will notify any of you who are customers of Amazon Associates affiliate program the moment Amazon posts a new earnings report for the day. Because of the unpredictable timing of when these reports would be made available, you have previously had to go to Amazon Associates Central and keep hitting the refresh key while waiting for the reports to post ... every day. With my new service, you no longer need to.
Connection between my new service and Google Alerts became obvious to me in the last couple of days. Both are simple notification services of information you care about and these notifications alleviate you from the need to poll for that information. So the next question that I started to think about is... what else can be automated the same way?
I check Alexa data frequently to see the latest traffic volume to my site. I know Alexa's data is not live because I frequently visit Alexa to see no changes. Wouldn't it be nice to get an automated notification when Alexa data does change? What about receiving the Technorati blog rank rating changes with the information as to what new blogs are linking to my site? What about getting an alert any time my Google PageRank changes so that I don't need to go back and check it frequently? What about getting notification if my site's relative Google search result position changes for a particular search term? What about my blog's subscription counts from Feedburner? A friend of mine mentioned that he would love to get a notification when he receives a new bid on his eBay auction, a service not currently available.
Suddenly, there seem to be dozens of new and interesting notifications that could be developed. What do you think may be a valuable notification service to you?
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