Free Marketing: 101 Low and No-Cost Ways to Grow Your Business, Online and Off

CHAPTER 2

DEFEND YOUR REPUTATION WITH SIMPLE FREE TOOLS

Monitor the entire Internet for any information that could influence your reputation.

Did you know that you can get automatic daily (or even up to the minute) notification showing you exactly where your name, product, business name, or industry is being discussed online?

There's really only one tool you'll need in order to put a very good monitoring plan in place, and it's free. While there are paid services available that can help you monitor your reputation, I've never used or needed anything except the free options.

I use free Google Alerts to notify me whenever any new content or discussions pop up online that contain the keywords I'm tracking. Once you set up the alerts you'll get an e-mail each time any new content or comments appear on any open access website that is monitored by Google (which is pretty much all of them). You can set the alerts to be sent to you immediately, daily, or weekly depending on your preferences.

To set up your free Google Alerts for your relevant search terms visit this site: www.Google.com/alerts.

Here are some creative ways to use alerts to defend yourself:

• Set up alerts for your business name, the names of all key leaders in your business, and any keyword terms relevant to your industry. It's not unusual to have many alerts set up.
• Set up alerts for your website domain names to see when and how they are mentioned.
• Monitor the web for plagiarism of your material. To do this set an alert ...