by Sarah Santacroce
This is the first out of two posts about some great Google Tools you can (and should) use for your small business. They are totally free of charge, but not everybody knows about them…
Google Alerts
I personally use Google Alerts to monitor anything that concerns Virtual Assistance in general, my company’s name and my own name. After setting up the alerts (see instructions below) you will get an e-mail from Google with all the new entries for a particular news item, blog, Web page update, or video. This is a great way to stay informed about your area of expertise, interact with people by leaving comments on their blogs and posting interesting articles on Twitter or Facebook.
Defining an alert is simple. Go to Google.com, click on “more” in the left hand corner, then click on “even more”. The Alerts tool is the first one on the list. Then you just define the type of alert you would like to receive, specify how often the alert should be delivered (as it happens, daily or weekly), and provide the e-mail address to which it should be sent. If you prefer not to clutter your e-mail account, you can also subscribe to the feed instead and add it to your Google Reader (see below).
Google Reader
According to Wikipidia, Goolge reader is a “is a Web-based aggregator, capable of reading Atom and RSS feeds online or offline.” In other words it is a web application which gathers web content such as news headlines, blogs, and podcasts in a single location for easy viewing.
It is very useful to collect information about your market, your expertise, your competitors, your clients etc. You can subscribe to RSS feeds of Blogs, websites, Twitter streams, online newspapers etc. The list of possibilities is endless. Let’s take the example of a blog: if you want to subscribe to the RSS feed of a blog, all you have to do is:
1. Find the the orange RSS Feed logo and click on it. 
2. It will then ask you with which reader you want to subscribe to the feed. Click on “Google Reader”
3. Then click on “Add to Google Reader” and the updates of this blog will now appear on your Google Reader!
Pretty useful, don’t you think?
If you like these two tools, don’t forget to come back next week (or just subscribe to my feed) when I will give you more details about two more handy tools: Google Feedburner and Google Wonderwheel
See you soon!
P.S. What is your favorite Google tool? List it in the comments!
