Find out what your target market wants

Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts) is a free service from Google which sends you an email alert whenever it finds new pages which mention certain key words or phrases.

What's great about it is that it can be used as a market research tool.

Use it to understand your target market better, find out what your competition is offering that market and keep an eye on your own online profile.

You decide on the key words and phrases and how frequently Google sends you alerts (so you're not bombarded with too many emails).

To get the most out of it, spend about half an hour thinking about the words that you want to be alerted on.

Simply putting 'Coaching' will bring up every news story or new web page mentioning the phrase and probably won't be all that helpful.

Broadly speaking, the sorts of key words and phrases you could consider fall under 5 categories:

• Your Market 
• What Your Market Searches For 
• Your Mentors 
• Your Competitors
• You - put in your own name and/or company name. If you have a common name, combine it with the word Coach, for example "Noel Lyons" Coach. This helps you to keep an eye on what other people are saying about you/your service online.

Remember to put quotation marks around words that need to searched for as a phrase, for example your name.

If you start getting alerts which aren't really relevant then you may need to refine your search terms.
 
You can use this service to find out what people are saying online and what they are actually looking for - rather than what you THINK they are looking for.