Want to stay on the cutting edge of your industry or sector without having to invest in expensive research? Google has a nifty tool called Google Alerts that allow you to stay in touch with breaking news (as well as new postings to non-news web sites) about virtually whatever you want.

If you own a hair salon that sells Redken, you might want to configure it so that you receive an email anytime there is news about: Redken “new product”. Using the quotes helps limit the news search because only when new and product appear next to each other will it generate an alert.

Simply enter your search terms at www.google.com/alerts and then choose whether you want news, news and web or groups as the area you want Google to scan. Then tell it how frequently you want to be notified – as it happens, daily or weekly and enter your email address and voila! you have created your first alert.

You can create as many of these alerts as you like and you can also tweak these alerts by adding or removing terms to make sure you don’t get information overload.