I know that Google are not always everyone’s cup of tea, especially when they start doing things like closing AdWords accounts seemingly at random.

On the other hand, they do provide an awful lot of excellent resources completely free, one of which you should definitely start taking advantage of if you are not already doing so.

This is Google Alerts, a service where Google will monitor any keyword term you want to keep an eye on and deliver information about when it is used to your e-mail inbox.

For example, if you wanted to track ‘linkbuilding’ and every time it is searched, you would enter the word on the Alerts homepage, click the link, confirm the request in the e-mail that Google send and that’s it. Now, every time someone uses ‘linkbuilding’ to search for information, Google will tell you all about it.

This is a superb resource (completely free as well) which you can obviously use in many different ways. However, I would recommend using it to keep an eye on when people are searching for information about you by name.

This is very convenient because it not only lets you see when people are saying nice things about you, but also when they are being less pleasant.

Knowing when people are ‘having a go’ is crucially important for your online business activities, because if someone is criticizing you or your business, it could cause irreparable damage to the reputation of one, the other or both.

Consequently, being able to pick derogatory comments and criticisms as quickly as possible allows you to get to the root of the problem before any real damage has been caused.

As an example, if a customer is complaining about your customer service, it could very quickly get out of hand but if you step in to prevent this happening, you avoid a small problem becoming a much larger crisis.

It takes about 30 seconds to set Google Alerts up, which for the amount of protection it provides for your good name in business is time extremely well spent.  If you’re not already tracking what people are saying about you on the net, you should start doing so right now.

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