Just as important as it is to use the internet and social media to create your brand, it is equally important to manage your brand as well. You should know what others are saying about you and your brand. Monitoring your personal brand will help you track everything that is posted and said about you online.

A few months ago, I was listening to the local DJ personality on the radio. He mentioned that someone, whose name was the same as his, had recently uploaded a controversial blog comment. I don’t remember the exact details of the blog comment, but I do remember thinking to myself… Wow, he’s monitoring his personal brand and knows when anything is posted that mentions his name.

This led me to wondering if others actually monitored their personal brand. How many people even know how to set up a system to monitor their personal brand? The good news is that I know how to set a monitoring strategy and it only takes one minute to set up.

Google is the most popular search engine on the web today. While there are many search engines online, such as Bing, Yahoo and AOL; Google seems to be the lead dog in the search engine world. The strategy I will teach you uses a special Google tool called Google Alerts.

Google Alerts is a free content monitoring system that automatically notifies users when new content from news, web, blogs, video and/or discussion groups match a set of search terms selected by the user and stored by the Google Alerts service. Notifications can be sent by email, as a web feed or displayed on the users iGoogle page. Gmail accounts are not required in order to take advantage of Google Alerts. Notifications can be sent to any email address.

While Google Alerts only provides content from Google’s own search engine; Google has the largest global average usage share and is the most popular search engine on the planet. Using Google as your alert system gives you the greatest amount of monitoring coverage offered from one search engine.

Users can determine the frequency of checks that are done for new results. Three options are available: “once a day”, “once a week”, or “as it happens”. These options set the maximum frequency of alerts and do not necessarily control how often they will receive alerts. Alerts are sent only if new content matches the user-selected search terms.

Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts)

Setting Up Your Personal Branding Search

1. Visit www.google.com/alerts.
2. Type your name in search terms box. (Use quotations around your name so that Google returns the exact phrase)
3. Select comprehensive as type. (You want Google to search all content match alerts)
4. Select how often you want to be notified if something is found (Suggested – once a day)
5. Email length – (optional)
6. Enter the email address you wish the alerts to be sent to
7. If you signed up to receive Google Alerts to an outside email address other than Gmail, you will receive an email asking you to confirm your request.  Click the confirmation link.
8. Once you have confirmed, Google Alerts will monitor the web and email you sites that mention your name.

View video tutorial below: