How to Monitor Your Online Reputation

One of the easiest tools for tracking what Google knows about a topic is Google Alerts. Subscribe to a Google Alert and receive an email as soon as your search phrase (like your name or company) enters Google's index. Google Alerts cover news stories, video comments, blogs, pages found in web search, and even Google's own mailing lists, Google Groups. Be forewarned: popular search terms will yield a lot of messages! Narrow your results down or opt to receive a daily or weekly digest (versus as-it-happens alerts).

Monitoring what's being said about you online is vital for anybody who works on the Web, or who uses any of the social networking sites. The above article gives you some tips on not only discovering what's being said about you, but (more importantly) controlling the message.

I suspect that Twitter and Friendfeed today are major traffic drivers to many sites. I have heard this in meetings with execs at major media companies. What this means is that you must to syndicate your content where the people are and then engage in conversations around it in order to influence.

The above article from Steve Rubel says he's getting major traffic from sites like Twitter.

I just checked my Clicky stats for some of my blogs, and here's what I found -- for niche blogs, most of my traffic is from Google.

Ditto for my writing blogs. I'm just not seeing major traffic from Twitter et al, probably because I haven't got anywhere near the followers which Steve Rubel has. Also probably because many/ most writers are not heavily using Twitter.

This presents a conundrum. If you want to get more traffic from the social networking sites, you need to spend more time there building presence.

On balance, for the time being I'd rather spend more time developing content on my blogs and attracting search engine traffic, since that's where most of my traffic is coming from.