As a small business owner with a limited budget to spend on online reputation management, you can take advantage of free resources that will help you monitor what people are saying about your business online. Some of these resources are automated meaning that once you set them up, you don’t need to touch them again while others are more manual in nature. One free automated resource that is easy to set up is Google Alerts which is a free Google service that sends you up to date email alerts anytime a particular subject matter is mentioned in any online media.
Simply go to http://www.google.com/alerts and go through these 5 easy steps:
STEP 1
Choose your search query- type in one of your business keywords such as your company name, your personal name, industry keywords etc. Examples of keywords may be ‘Antonio’s Restaurant’, ‘Italian Restaurants in Maine’, ‘Antonio Lombardo’. If you have more than one keyword, you need to create another alert for that extra keyword. You can create as many keyword alerts as you want.
STEP 2
Choose a Result Type- this option allows you to choose what kind of online media results you want. You can choose to get results from different Google sources such as news sites, blogs, discussion sites (groups, forums etc), videos and books. You only have the option to choose one or all result types. It’s best to choose the “everything” option.
STEP 3
Choose How Often You want Alerts to be sent to you – here there are three options – as it happens, once a day or once a week. You definitely want to choose the first option – as it happens- so that you can have instant results that will help you manage your reputation quickly.
STEP 4
Choose the quality of results sent to you- you can choose either to have all the results or just the best results.
STEP 5
Choose your delivery email address- you can use any email address you have. Just make sure it’s one you check on a daily basis.
Once you have chosen your preferred alert settings above, click the “create alert” button and you’re all done. From now on, Google will send you the most relevant keyword alerts according to your specifications.
If you would like to modify your alert settings for a particular keyword, just click on the “manage alert” link in your emails.
Remember that if you want to get alerts about different keywords, you need to create separate alerts. You can have all your alerts send to one email address or different ones. It’s probably best to create a separate email account to have all your Google Alerts sent to so that you don’t inundate your regular business email address.
