My daily routine includes sifting through a number of emails sent to me through Google Alerts. If you are not doing this yet, you should be. Here’s the link to Google Alerts.
In the spirit of “Google IS your resumé”, you might want to start with a simple alert based on your name. This has returned to me many many leads on people who’ve said nice things about me that I would’ve had NO clue about otherwise, and for which I can now send a Thank You (read this blog for more on the value of a Thank You).
Alerts are easy to set up, and there are a number of variables that allow you to customize your search:
1) Results (as in from blogs, discussion, news, video, etc.)
2) Frequency
3) Number
But the biggest variable of all, of course, is the keywords you use. Admittedly, this is a scatter-gun approach until you can really hone in on terms. Even then, you can’t avoid some flotsam. For instance, the search term “voice over” resulted in this golden notice on CraigsList recently:
“…Work from home, all I need is a simple voice over for a 30 second ad. I want someone with that real infomercial voice. This is for an educational project so I cannot pay at all but this will be perfect for your reel. Please contact if you are interested. This has a high chance of going viral….”
Yeah. Uh-huh. Avoid such appeals like insurance salesmen.
In other words, even the most pure terms (voice over) will result in crap quite often. I’ll admit, I don’t always have time every day to review the results, but I HAVE found gems that led to jobs in these listings.
So what terms to use? Be creative,but also simple. Be willing to change the wording, follow some guidelines (links below), and phrases are OK, if you bracket them in quotations.
Naturally, others have devoted a lot of attention to this. Here are some great links that offer tweaks for optimizing Google Alerts:
Maximizing Google Alerts to Improve Your Marketing
How to Maximize Your Use of Google Alerts
Google Alerts, How to Use Them
CourVO
