I was doing some work online last week when I
realized that many of you don’t know about Google Alerts. It’s free and it’s simple to use so if you are reading this, you need to be using Google Alerts. No, you don’t need to have a website in order to use it. However, if you do have a website, you have even more reasons to use it.
Here’s the eleven top reasons mental health professionals need to use Google Alerts.
- Identify keywords. If you are creating or maintaining a website, then keywords are important to you. Google Alerts allows you to search for and find keywords on the web.
- Develop content ideas. Likewise, if you are looking for new ideas to incorporate into your public speaking, writing, or online presence, you can do that easily with Google Alerts.
- Keep up with your colleagues. Get notified when your colleagues (and your competitors) are mentioned online.
- Trending and current events. It’s really important that you and your services do not appear to be dated. Google Alerts allows you to stay up-to-date and informed about the world around you.
- Detect plagarism. Whether in print or online, your words and artistic creations belong to you. That includes the forms you created, the artwork you develop, and the content you write for your website. Google Alerts is a free tool to help you monitor your own works online.
- Track employees. If you employ other therapists, administrative assistants, or others in your practice, you will want to be apprised of any activities online that have the potential to negatively impact your business. Google Alerts allows you to track your employees with ease.
- Monitor your digital footprint. Of course, you will also want to monitor your own online image. Some people refer to this as a “vanity search.” Regardless of what you call it, you don’t need to have a website in order to take this step. Just do it.
- Find services and products. This allows you to monitor what is showing up about services and products that are similar to your own.
- Pull in research and references. Need some help researching a certain issue or topic? Google alerts can bring all that information straight to your email inbox and allow you to reference it easily!
- Track links coming into your website. As other websites reference you and link back to your website, you will want to know and respond to those links with a thank you or rebuttal.
- Search for videos to augment your blog. The younger your audience, the more important it is to include varied forms of media on your website. Google Alerts allows you to easily search and find videos to augment your site.
- Link building via commenting. Commenting is a terrific way to build incoming links to your website and Google Alerts helps you find those sites that you would most like to comment on.
Surely you’ve found at least a few reasons why you need to be using Google Alerts. It’s simple to set up and costs you nothing. And, if you need a little tutorial that walks you through set-up, here is a link to help you out! So take a moment to try it out and tell us what you are going to do with your Google Alert!







How a Tiny Picture of You Can Help Drive Traffic to Your Website or Blog
Dec13
2011
For those of you who have been with me a while, you already know about my web guru and friend, Beth Hayden of Blogging with Beth fame. I was trying to figure out how to add a tiny little picture of me (and you) to our comments so . . . of course, I called Beth. She made this so simple that I invited her to write a guest post to share with all of you and she graciously agreed to do so. Check this out!
(If you are interested in writing a guest post, check out the guidelines here.)
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A Guest Post by Beth Hayden
Are you regularly commenting on other people’s blogs? You can use comments to encourage your favorite bloggers, to thank them, to show support, to give an example, or to contribute to the discussion in a myriad of ways.
If you’re commenting thoughtfully – and consistently adding your blog URL to the “Website” field in the comment form – you are hopefully seeing some traffic flowing back to your site as a result of your comments. It’s a great (and FREE) way of picking up some extra traffic.
But there’s a way to make your comments even MORE powerful and making it even MORE likely that people will click through to your blog and sign up for your mailing list or become regular readers.
Perhaps you’ve been noticing recently that when some people comment on a blog, a little picture of the person appears next to her name. Those little pictures look like this:
When you use that little image for your comments, it makes it more likely that people will click through to your blog from your remark. A picture makes you more recognizable, more authentic, and a thousand times more relate-able than your name alone.
And that small image also has another HUGE benefit – it helps the host blogger get to know you. I recently read an interview with Sonia Simone of Copyblogger in which she highly recommends using these little images. She said if she can put a name with a face when she sees your comment, it makes you much more memorable. And being more memorable makes it more likely that she’ll be willing to open your email when you write to her to submit a guest post for publication on Copyblogger.
If that’s true for Sonia, it’s true for tons of tons of other host bloggers, too. That little image – that teeny little you – can make the difference between your emails getting OPENED and your emails getting IGNORED.
That little image we’ve been talking about is called a Gravatar. And they’re really easy to set up and use.
Go to Gravatar.com to set up your account. It takes just a few minutes. Tips:
Once you create your Gravatar, every time you use your email address to comment on a site that uses Gravatars, you’ll see your photo automatically appear if that particular blog has Gravatars activated on their site. You don’t need to do anything special or upload that image again. Just enter your email address in the comment box field, and Gravatar.com will do the work for you.
Create your own “little teeny you” at Gravatar.com today. It takes five minutes and will start paying off as soon as you post your next comment!
About the Author: Beth Hayden helps business owners make more money
by helping them create fabulous websites, blogs, and social media campaigns. Get her best tips for improving your blog by downloading her free report, From Blah to Hurrah: 25 Ways to Make Your Blog Bigger, Better and More Profitable.
Filed under: Marketing, Technology, To-Do's Tagged with Avatar | Gravatar, Building Trust, Commenting, How To's, Image | Reputation
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