Emerging Google Trends

Niches and keywords related to niches can vary significantly over time.  Had Google been in existence 100 years ago, you would likely have found a lot more listing for Buggy whips than you would today.  People change, markets change and thus its a good idea to pay attention to trends within the market place.

That turns out to be easy when you you use Google Trends.

You may have noticed a little magnifying glass next to keywords displayed on the Google Keyword tool we looked at in out last post. Had you clicked on that you would be taken to a page in Google Trends for that particular keyword.  Also in the keyword tool is a chart showing the relative strength of searches by months for the prior 12 months.

This is valuable information that you should take note of.

If you want to really get into trend analysis though, the place to go is Google Trends itself. Again the easiest way to get there is to use Google Search and Search for “Google Trends.”  Or you can remember the URL as http://www.google.com/trends

Once there you will see a Google Logo, a search box, some example searches, and two lists. One lists hot topics, and the second lists Hot Searches.

These hot topics and searches will change rapidly, but are a good indication of what is currently hot online. If you are blogging, this can be a great way of keeping up with where the most activity is online.  One strategy is to develop a blog posting on multiple hot topics on a daily basis and bookmarking them.  If you keep it up over time, you can drive a lot of current events type traffic to your blog. This you can in turn monetize with adwords or other promotions.

In general though, as part of our niche market research project we are more interested in longer term trends.

Say we are interested in the diet market. We could type the phrase “lose weight” into the Google Trends search box and get the following results.

There is quite a bit of information here. Perhaps the most important is that the overall trend appears to be increasing over the five years of data reported on the chart. While it may be difficult to see above, there also appears to be a dip just before the Christmas holidays, followed by a spike with the new year.

On the right are various news articles whose publication is noted on the chart with letters marking their date of publication. This can have a significant impact on some searches although it appears to be minimal in this particular case.

Finally on the bottom you can discover which regions of the world are most interested in the keyword phrase.  In this case, the US followed by Australia, Singapore and Ireland. To the bottom right, these trends are even further broken down by cities.  The results vary from time to time, but for some reason there appears to be heightened interest from a number of Texas cities at the moment.  It appears not everyone is interested in being the biggest in everything in Texas.

Lets look at another search term. This time we will explore “Golf Slice.”

When we do, we see a distinct seasonal pattern. Searches for “golf slice” are significantly higher in the summer than in the winter. Not too hard to understand.  Of note the peak number of searches appears to be decreasing, but the breadth of the base appears to be widening over time. This suggests that more people are looking for information on their golf slice throughout the year, than may have been the case before, but the niche is still strongly seasonal.

One more example to make a final point a bit more emphatically. This time we will search for the keyword phrase, “how to make money online.”

Here we see a very dramatically rising trend. This must certainly be a top candidate as a niche to explore. But lets look to the bottom of the chart again and look at the regions doing the search.  Topping the list is Nigeria, followed by the Philippines, Malaysia, India, and South Africa.

Nothing wrong with that, but it could be a problem if you are primarily interested in selling a product to the North American market.  Also note at the bottom right is a listing of the languages spoken by the searchers. The top language is Tagalog which is the Philippino national language followed by English.

Hopefully, you can see the value of understanding the trends in the marketplace, and the role that this free tool can play in helping you in both the niche selection process and also how you might plan for seasonal variations within your market.

Using Google’s Wonderful Word Tool

The Google Key Word Tool is perhaps the most valuable of the free tools we are going to be discussing. In the past and in many dated online eBooks you will find references to the Overture Keyword Tool which is defunct, one of Yahoo’s biggest mistakes in my opinion. Today the world uses Google Free Keyword tool to explore and select keywords for a wide variety of purposes.

To access the tool,  open your existing Google Adwords account or if you don’t have one go to Google and search for “Google Keyword Tool.”

Google has recently changed to layout of their site.  The Keyword Tool is not immediately evident. You need to click on the “Opportunities” tab. When you do, any existing campaigns you are running will appear at the top of the left column.  You may need to scroll down to see the second box in the left column which is titled, “Tools.”

Once there, just click on the Keyword Tool and you will be taken to the tool we will discuss today.

The tool permits two related but completely different functions.  You can search for keywords on a particular web site, or you can do research on keywords related to a specific keyword phrase.  We are going to focus on the later, but will discuss the former first.

In our last post we discussed how to drill down in the Google Directory to find a niche.  In the final stages of that process we came to the end of the line, where we ran into articles related to our niche.  I advised that we examine those sites to learn about out new niche, and to see if there were advertisers or not to determine if it were commercially viable.

Once we identified the most interesting sites already in the niche, we can take their url’s and plug them into the keyword tool.

In our search we drilled down ultimately to Sleep Apnea, and the top page ranked entry under it was the following: http://www.sleepapnea.org/

When we put this URL into the Google Keyword Tool we can see the keywords that led people to this site. This is valuable information, and can provide us with insights into the niche.  Specifically it will help us identify the keyword phrases we will want to consider focusing our niche marketing on.

When Google Returns the results, it ranks them in accordance to Google’s sense of the most relevant Keyword Phrases.  In this case, sleep apnea, sleep apnea treatment, sleep apnea machine, sleep apnea masks, cpap mask, cpap masks. etc.

Now I don’t know much about sleep apnea, but I now know that something called CPAP is up there in relevance. Depending on whatever niche you are exploring you may find similar surprises, that you will want to explore.

And while sleep apnea appeared as if it might be a small niche, we are beginning to see the possibility of even smaller niche in the form of masks and machines and possibly other treatment methodologies.  These may be options that could be monetized.

Now is we go back and put in the phrase “Sleep Apnea” in the word or phrase box, we get a similar but different list.

It’s headed by the phrase, sleep apnea treatment, sleep apnea diagnosis, obstructive sleep apnea, severe sleep apnea, sleep apnea symptoms, etc.

Once again these are initially ranked by what Google sees as the most relevant term we entered into the box.  If we want, we can click on the headers above any of the columns and get the results ranked in ascending or descending order by that column.

Its lead by the term Insomnia, followed by apnea, sleep apnea, apnea sleep, snoring, narcolepsy, sleep aid and so on.  These are the terms that are related to sleep apnea that get the most traffic. We found a new term, narcolepsy that merits some examination and as we scroll down the list there are a few more interesting terms that we may not have thought of when we first started to explore sleep apnea.

This access to related terms is valuable. By taking them and using them in the keyword tool as new phrases we may find even more terms that we might otherwise miss altogether.

We won’t do that now, but you should with your niche studies.

We will discuss two additional items though.

The first is the competition graph.

If the bar graph is completely full, it is both good and bad news. The good is that the niche is actively being pursued by advertisers, which indicates a good chance that money can be made in this niche.  The bad is that it is already a contested market so it will not be easy to break into the top without a major effort.

You may decide that you want to make that effort.  If you are looking to use the internet to sell your existing product line, you may have no choice. However if you are looking for a new market to enter, you do have a choice and should use the following technique to identify a market that is both lucrative and that you have a chance to dominate.

I learned this approach originally through the Niche Profit Classroom. You can see a small banner ad of there’s in the upper right of the blog page. I found their entire program to be well worth the modest membership fee and can comfortably recommend them to you.

They outlined something they call the money market matrix.  Since I learned it from them, I have heard similar approaches advocated by others as well.  I will give you my short hand approach now.

Rather than focusing on the high end of the search results we are going to go down the list and focus on keywords that have 300 or more hits a month up to those that get about 2000 to 2500.  This range is somewhat arbitrary and you can certainly go beyond it in either direction.

Your goal is not to find the most popular search term, it’s to find a frequently used search term that is relevant to your niche and/or product for which their are relatively few competitors.  By relatively few my shorthand answer is 50,000 or less.

The term “Sleep Apnea” returned 800 results so we have to scroll down to the bottom of the second page of 100 results to get in range.

The top item on the screen capture above is the term, “sleep apnea help.”

The Google Keyword Tool tells us that it is getting an average of 1600 hits a month. That’s slightly over 50 a day.  So while not huge, it’s likely a steady source of traffic interested in the topic.  Next we are going to a new tab on our browser.  There we will do a search using the regular Google search tool for “Sleep Apnea Help”  being sure to include the quote marks. That way we will get the total number of results that use that precise term.  It turns out that in this case the result is 8220 which is well under my threshold of 50,000 competing sites.

While I am there, I notice that there are a lot of ads, which tells me this is a solid keyword phrase I could hope to build upon. Note there are three ads on top of the organic search results and a full side panel as well.

The Google Keyword tool is an extremely valuable tool, with a number of additional features.  I’ve tried to show you some of the basics as well as a strategy to put the information you can derive from the tool to work for you.

In my next post, we will explore Google Trends.

Free Internet Marketing Research Methods

There are a number of free internet marketing research tools and resources that will greatly enhance your ability to identify and exploit profitable niche markets.

These include:

  1. Google Directory
  2. Google Keyword tool
  3. Google Trends
  4. Forums
  5. Clickbank
  6. Quantcast

In the next several blog posts we will examine each of these in turn as we pursue our web marketing strategy of identifying profitable niche markets where we can become a dominant force.

The first market research strategy we will examine is the use of the Google Directory to begin the process of drilling down from a major category into some potential niches.

To start we will open our browser and go to http://Google.com/dirhp

When we do we will see a page that looks like this.

Arts, Business, Computers, Games, Health etc. are major categories that you can use to begin the sorting process.  For this example, we will select Health and click on it.

When we get the next screen we start refining our search. Notice at this level the categories also have a number along side them, giving an indication of how many articles are in each category.

By selecting Conditions and Diseases we are brought down one more level, where again we find many additional sub categories.

Here we will pick Sleep Disorders for this example. And are taken to on final screen, where we can pick a particular niche to explore. In this case we will select Sleep Apnea and begin our process of determine whether or not this is a good niche to consider for our purposes.

Here we can explore existing sites that are related to sleep apnea. They are initially ranked by Google Page Rank. By searching these sites we can check to see if there are advertisers on these sites which will indicate whether or not this is a viable market for us to enter. We can also research the topic to identify any gaps we might be able to fill, and possibly identify even smaller niches we might wish to enter.

This is a very simple tool to use, and yet a powerful way to begin your niche marketing research. In our next post we will explore the Google Keyword Tool.

Selecting a Niche: Some Starting Points

Before we start searching for your new niche, lets review how the niche marketing process works.

•    Step 1 – You need to pick a viable niche.
•    Step 2 – You need to study and understand the niche.
•    Step 3 – You need to create and/or find a product to promote to this niche. (This is where you provide a solution to them)
•    Step 4 – You design your campaign, copywriting, and drive traffic to your niche website.
•    Step 5 – You generate nice niche profits.

In my next couple of posts we will discover a number of free tools you can use to assist in this process of selecting a niche.  But before we go into depth on using these tools lets start deciding what niche we want to research and develop.

There are 3 main themes that are highly lucrative for niche marketing, that you should be aware of. They are: –

1.    Health
2.    Wealth
3.    Relationships

You can never really go wrong with these as starting points when selecting a niche.  There are always people having problems and desperately looking solutions in all three.

However, these 3 categories mentioned here are very broad. So what you need to do is to use the tools, that will be demonstrated later, to dig deeper into these broad categories before selecting a niche to exploit.

That way you can become the “expert” to provide specific solutions to your new niche easier, faster and better.

In addition to these broad categories you may want to think in terms of broad motivations that people may have within a category.

For example, think of ‘people in transition’. If someone has just lost their job, they are more likely to be searching for solutions and willing to take action when an appropriate solution presents itself.

Another example would be a wife filing for a divorce. This is also a transitional period where the couple may be looking for a specific solution for the family or solutions on how to move forward with their relationship.

Sometimes one side of the couple may even be seeking out advice to get back together with the spouse or partner.

So people in transitions are normally ‘hungry’ because they are desperately in need to get out of their current chaos.

Another lucrative type of market is the ‘in the news trends’. While these may or may not be long lived niches, they can be highly profitable while they are prominent in the public’s mind.

In the news trends are often just a quick dash or sometimes a prolonged situation. Often it’s a wave that needs to be caught. An example of ‘In the news trend’ would be the recent retrenchment and unemployment news.

News stories about the current recession and high unemployment rates are all over the news. These people are currently in chaos. They’ve lost their jobs and need to find a solution as soon as possible to sustain their lifestyle and their monthly commitments.

While this may always be the case to some extent, when you are in a major trend it’s wise to use effective marketing to capitalize on the situation.

Another example might be ‘celebrity diets’.

News about the latest celebrity diets are evident in gossip magazines, TV channels, and on various trend indicators as we will discuss. When you see a trend capturing the media’s attention, it is ‘hot.’   People will very often craze about it during that period of time.

Again it takes some nimbleness, but niche marketers who are prepared to catch and ride on these waves can generate extraordinary niche profits.

So when thinking about effective marketing for a new niche consider not just what niche, but whether you can identify some “moving force” that might motivate people within your new niche to take action.

Niche Market Research Objectives

Market research is the foundation and key to all successful niche programs. It is important to identify and research an appropriate niche before you decide which product or products to sell.

The first step is finding your niche. You want a target audience that is hungry for a solution to a problem they have. And that are willing to pay for a proper solution.

This second point is important. There are hungry niches that are not willing to pay for a solution, particularly where the solution is information. Now there are many niches where people will be willing to pay for quality information but not all. You want to avoid a niche that doesn’t already have competitors selling to them because the odds are they aren’t buyers.

Once you have found a new niche, you want to understand their problems, trends and behaviors. This means you will need to spend some time learning about the niche, listening and discussing issues that affect them, and research the existing products and vendors that are active in the niche.

The result of your market research and analysis should be a thorough understanding of the niche, so that you are an actual expert in the niche. This doesn’t mean you need be the most informed person, but clearly the better you understand your new niche the better.

As part of this new market research you will examine the existing products and services offered and determine there strengths and weaknesses. As you gain familiarity with the niche you will want to do trend research to see where the niche is going. To the extent their is a trend you clearly want to get in front of it and become its leader.

Where there is no trend you will need to focus on what’s missing? What subset of the niche is still having a problem that’s not being met.
If such a subset exists, you have found a new niche.

Perhaps the dominant product is the best product for the time being. Will you be able to market it better than it is now, now that you have a clearer understanding of the niche.

Each journey into finding a niche and creating niche profits is different.
But each successful niche marketing research project seeks to:

  • Identify Specific Market Needs
  • Identify Price Range of Existing Products in the Market
  • Evaluate the Quality and Effectiveness of the Existing Products
  • Focus on Understanding the Demographic Base of the Niche

When you are done with your research, you should be able to identify your specific audience, and know exactly what they are looking for.  You should be clear on how you can help them meet those needs and have a specific solution to their problems. And finally you should be able to establish a solid case for why they should listen to you, when you offer them your solution.

What Are The Advantages in Niche Marketing?

There are several advantages to our simple marketing plan of focusing on niches online.

The first is that by narrowing our topic to something very specific, we allow ourselves the opportunity to become an expert on that narrow niche. To be effective as a marketer, you want to be seen as an authority, someone you customers can trust. Because trust is a key element of the buyers decision making process.

It’s much easier to learn everything important there is to know about Ice Fishing lures and gear than it is to learn everything there is to know about fishing in general.

By selecting a niche and learning about it through research, you will be viewed as an expert who provides solutions for your audience.

Additionally, by focusing on a smaller niche market you will have more targeted customers and less competition. This means you will be in a position to be the dominant force within your niche market.

In other words, you will be the big fish in the little pond, as opposed to being a little fish in a big one.

In niche marketing, the concept is first to identify an audience or customer base. Then to study and understand them so that you have a good handle on what they are looking for, what they are hungry for. And then you feed it to them, by promoting a relevant product to meet that demand. That product may be someone else’s or your own, but the key is that before you go to the trouble of promoting it, you have already identified the people who want it, and understand how and why it will meet their needs. It then is a simple matter to sell it.

The primary advantage of niche marketing is that it reduces resistance to the sales process. You are no longer trying to get people to buy something they don’t want. Instead you are helping them solve their specific problem. As such you become their hero, which is a far more satisfying outcome.

Starting From Scratch: Deciding What Niche to Pursue

Whether you are just starting out for the first time, or adding to an existing internet marketing empire you need to start with a simple marketing plan to find a new niche online.

The advantage of the internet is the ability for people to find specific information on narrow topics of interest to them. With hundreds of millions of people searching for everything under the sun, it becomes possible to do target market marketing by narrowly focusing on a lucrative market where there is demand for products. The trick as a marketer is to identify what niche you can effectively exploit.

In the next several blog postings we will discuss the topic of finding niches that you can develop into your own little piggy banks. Once we have finished that we will move on to how to properly develop those niches.

So what is a niche?

A niche market is a subset of the market on which a specific product is focused. Ultimately that means that every product has its own niche, but to start by focusing on the product is generally a mistake.

For niche marketing internet style, it’s best to first identify the niche, and their needs before you get to the product or solution.

So this implies that a niche is a group of people with a common interest. As an example, millions of people will identify themselves as fishermen or women. But within the overall category of fishing, you will find people who when more specific will say they are into Deep Sea Fishing, or Trout Fishing, or Bass Fishing, or even Ice Fishing.

Within any of these narrower categories there may be additional categories or sub niches, such as Bass Fishing Boats, Bass Fishing Vacations, or Bass Fishing Tips, etc.

As a marketer, our simple niche marketing strategy calls for us to seek out a small segment of larger markets, and identify the needs of the people in that small niche and then provide specific solutions to those needs by selling them solutions to fulfill their demand.

Easy enough to say, but how do we identify profitable niches, where people are hungry for solutions? That will be the topic of our future posts.

Using Google and all they offer

Mike Paetzold here for my last day as the guest poster as part of The Old Bald Guy’s Blog Tour. This week we have been discussing how to help offline businesses use the net effectively.

We have covered

  • Mistakes that offline businesses make
  • Protecting your online reputation
  • 4 advantages of using a blog as your web site

Today we will discuss using what the 800 pound gorilla gives you. Yes, love them or hate them Google is the 800 pound gorilla online but there are some things they have that can help you immensely.

When we discussed protecting your reputation we mentioned one – Google Alerts. That is just one of many tools that Google provides that you can use.

Google Local Search

For offline businesses one of the often overlooked items is Google local search. Adding your profile there can be very helpful as the local search shows at the very top of the page.

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It sits above the regular listings but if you do not sign up and submit your site you probably will not show. Even if you had the number one listing there were 7 other choices first if you do not go and submit your information.

You can add your own description, some pictures and even coupons that you can offer directly from local search. Your customers can leave a review and if you are smart you will ask your happy customers to do just that.

Google Analytics

Google will track your visitors and give you a ton of great information so you can find out exactly how people find you, how long they stay, how many pages they view and much more. You can not improve what you haven’t measured.

Google Webmaster Tools

When you sign up at Google Webmaster Tools it will allow you to see your site the way Google does. You can see if your site map is working, how many pages they have indexed and a lot more.

The more you know about what is happening the easier it is to improve what you are doing. Google has made it easy to find these things out if you take the time to look.

Hope you have enjoyed my visit and you have learned a thing or two. It has been fun to be here but next week I will be off to another blog.

Remember though that knowledge without action is worthless so follow what Nike recommends and “Just Do It!”

About the author

 

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Mike Paetzold has been online since 2000 and runs numerous blogs and works with offline businesses through Coal Region Web Services. Currently you can find out what he is up to at Mike Paetzold Recommends.

You can also find out and keep current with WordPress at his blog WordPress Made Easy.

Follow Mike on Twitter

4 Advantages To Using A Blog For Your Website

Mike Paetzold back again for day 4 of my visit here as part of The Old Bald Guy’s Blog Tour. This week our topic is “Helping Offline Businesses Use The Net Effectively. Yesterday we discussed the two major website mistakes. Today we will discuss what you should use as your web base.

Now I may be just a bit prejudiced but I like to use WordPress as the base for any site.

There are 4 major reasons…

  1. Proper infrastructure
  2. Easy to update
  3. Interactive
  4. Google loves them

Lets take them one reason at a time.

Proper infrastructure

With plugins a WordPress blog makes it very easy to use proper title tags on each page. Your interlinking is automated allowing you easy navigation and making it easy for the spiders to find your content.

The other things that I like is the built in RSS feed, the automation of your sitemap in a format the serps want and the ability to automatically ping various sites and let everyone know that you have added content.

All of these can be duplicated in other web site formats but it usually takes a lot more work and maintenance.

Easy to update

Once a WordPress blog is set up and tweaked out it is really easy to add new content without having to do a lot of HTML editing. Anyone that can use a Word Processing program has the skills to update a blog properly.

Interactivity

A blog makes it easy for you to get feedback from your visitors and still control the content through your approval process of comments. This also adds new content to your site that you did not have to generate.

Google loves them

Nuff said. No, not really but as Google draws about 65% of all the web searches having your content in a format that Google likes is a plus. Add in the ability to automatically notify Google through your site map and pinging gets you indexed quickly.

Now that is not a guarantee that you get the #1 ranking but it does make it easy to make sure you check all the on page SEO factors automatically.

Tomorrow we will talk a lot more about Google and what tools an offline business needs to be aware of and take advantage of.

 

About the author

 

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Mike Paetzold has been online since 2000 and runs numerous blogs and works with offline businesses through Coal Region Web Services. Currently you can find out what he is up to at Mike Paetzold Recommends.

You can also find out and keep current with WordPress at his blog WordPress Made Easy.

Follow Mike on Twitter

Offline Business Mistakes When Using The Net

Mike Paetzold back again for day 3 of my visit here as part of The Old Bald Guy’s Blog Tour. This week our topic is “Helping Offline Businesses Use The Net Effectively. Today we will discuss website mistakes.

Probably the very biggest mistake I see when talking to new clients is what I call the “ME” website. I am sure you have seen these sites. They will tell you all about the company, how long they have been in business, who owns them, yada yada yada.

Now in a nut shell my response and the response of most people finding that site is who cares. All of that can be important because I want to deal with reputable complanies and knowing they are not fly by night but if I am searching for something I have a problem.

I only want to know one thing – WHAT CAN YOU DO FOR ME?

That is really all I need to know and once I know that then you can make me comfortable by having all of the stuff about you where I can locate it but if I am looking to get rid of bugs I want to know can you do it?

Target your site to the visitor and what is in it for them. Even though you as the business owner are paying to have the site it will make money for you when you can get a visitor to take an action.

If you are the exterminator that action is to call you or email you to get your service. Make sure that you are telling me how you can help me and not who you are because I don’t care about the latter.

Second big thing I see is most offline businesses when they come online do not take advantage of lead generation. Give your visitors a reason to let you stay in contact with them.

Here is an example- I receintly met with an auctioneer to redo his site, The first thing we talked about is creating 2 audios. One on how to get the best bargains at an auction and the second on 5 ways to use an auction to get more value when you are selling.

Both of these are easy topics for the auctioneer as he has a ton of experience. Offer the two audios in exchange for an email address to all of his visitors. They get to hear him and understand auctions from both sides. He has started to become someone they now know.

Follow that up with a regular newsletter and let people know about his latest auction for buyers and send out a latest pricing update to potential sellers.

Now he can continue to build the relationship and get more people to each of his auctions and make sure that potential sellers at least give him a chance when they are ready to sell items.

So there are two big mistales to avoid.

  • No “ME” website
  • Generate leads

There are many more mistakes but those are two of the biggest and Earl has covered a lot of the technical ones previously and tomorrow we will talk more about them.

Talk to you then.

 

About the author

 

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Mike Paetzold has been online since 2000 and runs numerous blogs and works with offline businesses through Coal Region Web Services. Currently you can find out what he is up to at Mike Paetzold Recommends.

You can also find out and keep current with WordPress at his blog WordPress Made Easy.

Follow Mike on Twitter

Protecting Your Reputation Online

Mike Paetzold back again for day 2 of my stop here as part of The Old Bald Guy’s Blog Tour. This week we are discussing helping off line businesses use the net effectively.

As Google or one of the other search engines becomes the first place that people look for a business instead of older sources like the Yellow Pages it is important for businesses to at least be found there.

Even more important than that is to know what others are saying about them. The advent of the Web 2.0 world has created a lot of sites where customers can rate the service of a variety of businesses. Most are interactive and will allow you to respond if you know the content is there.

As the search engines make this content easy for people that are looking for you to find it is important to know exactly what is being said about you.

Fortunately Google has made it quite easy to find out exactly what is being said about you. This gives you a chance to address problems.

The way Google does that is through a service called Google Alerts. It is easy to set up an alert on your business name, your own name, your product names or on any topic and they will send you an email telling you exactly what they have found as they find it.

First go to http://google.com/alerts and you will see a screen like below.

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Just add your topic, use comprehensive for your type, decide how often you want to hear, put in the email you want to receive the alerts at and click the create button.

Now each time Google finds that topic on any new web page of any type you will be notified. Now at the very least you will know if there is something being said that can hurt you or your business.

This will allow you to address any problems you may find quickly and not get surprised. If it is an interactive site like a forum or blog you will have the opportunity to address it in the same place that someone looking for you will find it.

It pays to be aware, have your own web presence and to be proactive in protecting your name online. Don’t be caught by surprise and go set up an alert today.

 

About the author

 

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Mike Paetzold has been online since 2000 and runs numerous blogs and works with offline businesses through Coal Region Web Services. Currently you can find out what he is up to at Mike Paetzold Recommends.

You can also find out and keep current with WordPress at his blog WordPress Made Easy.

Follow Mike on Twitter