asked to walk someone through setting up Google Alerts for their business. So I thought I would post to here for everyone to refer back to. If you need help anywhere along the way, let me know by commenting below or by asking me on one of my Social sites.

In your web browsers address bar type in this address: http://www.google.com/alerts
You will get a page that looks like the following:

In the “Search terms” box type in the keywords you want to get alerts on (keywords that you have used in your business, keywords you are using in a marketing campaign, any words you want to get alerts on when they are indexed through Google).

In the drop down box for “Type” select the type of information you want (Blogs, videos, etc). You can do alerts for each one if you want or if you want all of them, select “Everything”.

Decide how many you want per email and select the email address you want them to go to. You can use any email address you have. I use one of my gmail accounts. If you want to use a gmail account and don’t have one, you can get one here.
Click “Create Alert” and you are done.
If you look on the right side where it says “You can also click here to manage your alerts” and click on it, you will go to a page that looks like the following:

Here you can manage all your alerts and you can even add alerts from here. If you notice one of mine says “Feed View in Google Reader” if you want this done and can’t figure it out, I can show you later. You can delete alerts, change your email address and anything else about the alert from here.

Now go set up LOTS of alerts for either your business, your clients OR your competitors.  Google Alerts in ONE way to manage your Online Reputation or someone else’s.

I was asked to present to the International Virtual Assistants Organization about
HootSuite.  I choose to show them how teams or groups can use HootSuite to bettermonitor not only their online reputation but the online reputation of their clients as well.  I have decided to post it here in case some of you missed it.  If you have questions or need assistance, feel free to contact me and I would be glad to help you.

Last night I was working and decided to take a break and check my email.  As I go through, I saw an email newsletter from a friend and fellow colleague and thought that I could read it real quick.  As I am going through it I am thinking, “hmmm, I wonder how her social media icons look in here”, so I am scrolling and then I think “where are they?”, she must have forgotten to put them in.  So I message her and as we are talking she says this to me “it never occurred to me to put them in there”.  I felt like a ton of bricks hit me…then I got the building thrown on me “you didn’t tell me to put them in there”.  I didn’t? Was I supposed to have?  Should I have to?  I then asked, they are in your email right?”  I was deeply wounded to know that “no, I didn’t know to” was the answer.  OUCH…how are you going to get found if you don’t tell others where to find you? 

Lesson learned for me and her!  Social media is EVERYWHERE…where should you be posting your social media sites? EVERYWHERE!!  Put them in your newsletters, your email signatures, business cards, your resource boxes or author’s boxes in your articles, OTHER social media sites you belong to.  How do you expect to get found if you don’t tell everyone everywhere you go how to find you?

So for those that think I have never told you:  Your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. should be posted EVERYWHERE if you want to be found there.

I was looking around the web and I ran into a cool and fun tool that I have used on occasion with my updates on my Facebook Profile. Below are 2 of them.

It is the Flip My Text site.  This site will flip what you write so it is upside down, reversed, and a host of other ways.  Check out the sample below:

The other one are the symbols.  The symbols can be done by (make sure your num lock key is pressed) pressing “alt” and a number on the numlock pad and letting go.  You will get a wide range of stuff.  Below I have some examples that you can just copy and paste from, if you don’t want to make your own.

and there are a HOST of others.  You can spend hours at your keyboard typing them out.  You can also search the internet and find a HOST of websites that have them up there, so you can just copy and paste.  You can even download these in a PDF from here if you like.  (I will be updating the PDF to include more during the week.) Just bookmark this blog for easy reference.

Recently, I was asked “How do you share a video you found on YouTube on your Facbook”.

The steps are easy.

1.  When you find a YouTube video you want to share on your wall you do the following:

2. You will see the above picture BELOW the video you are watching on YouTube.  You click the “Share” button and the following box will show (if it is not already):

3. Once you click on the Facebook button, the Publish box in Facebook pops up:

I hope this helps…let me know if you have issues with it.