What Are People Saying About You Online?

What Are People Saying About You Online?
By Kathleen Gage

Wonder what is being said about you on the Internet? Or if your articles are gaining visibility? What about any blogs your name might show up in?

It is a great idea to monitor your name and reputation online. You can do this for free by using a simple tool made available by Google. It is called Google Alerts.

It’s Easy
Signing up is very, very easy and takes only a couple minutes. Go to: www.google.com/alerts to begin the process.

What to Get an Alert On
You can get an alert on just about anything. Some uses of alerts are to:

Monitor a specific topic
Find out what is happening with a company you are working with
Keeping current on a competitor
Getting the latest and greatest on a celebrity person or sports team
Keep an eye on your name, book, blog, company or just about anything related to you or your business

Narrow the search
Whatever you are keeping an eye on put the information in quotation marks. For example, if I want to get an alert on my name I would input the request like this.

“kathleen gage”

This will narrow the search criteria. If I don’t narrow the search by adding the quotation marks, as in the case of my name, I will receive notices on alerts that have Kathleen in them and alerts that have Gage in them. Let’s say Kathleen Jones had something show up on the net, I may receive a notice on her. Or maybe Bob Gage has something on the Internet. I may also receive this information. All this does is clog my inbox.

The more narrow you desire the search to be the more you need to put the topic in quotation marks.

Frequency of Notification
Unless you don’t care about receiving lots of email notices it is recommended to set the delivery frequency to once a day or once a week.

Depending on what your search criteria includes and the frequency of how often the topic shows up, if you set the frequency to as-it-happens you may become overwhelmed with all the notices.

Type of notice
Under type you may want to choose comprehensive. This way, whenever something shows up based on your criteria, you get a notice.

If gaining visibility on the Internet is important to you take a few minutes to set up Google alerts for anything that you would like to monitor. This way you can see when and what is showing up that is of importance to you.

Kathleen Gage is an Internet Marketing Advisor for Speakers, Trainers, Authors, Consultants and Entrepreneurs. Access her eBook The Truth about Making Money on the Internet at http://www.streetsmartsmarketing.com/free-ebook.htm