Yesterday we talked about content and how to maximize it. Once it's maximized, you're still not done. In fact, that's only half the battle. The other half is monitoring your online presence and making adjustments as needed. And there's no better way to regaining control of your business than knowing exactly where you're reaching, who you're reaching, and what people are saying.

I challenge you to monitor your online presence.

As a business owner, there's one thing you should have in your bag of tricks: Google Alerts. If you haven't done so, go ahead and set-up Google alerts for your name, variations of your name, your business name, and then any industry keywords or competitors you'd like to monitor.  Google alerts will let you keep tabs on your presence as content hits the web.

The next no-brainer is making sure you have google analytics set-up to monitor your website and traffic. If you have a WordPress site, there's several plugins that allow you to do this. My personal favorite is Google Analytics for WordPress by Yoast. If you do not have a WordPress website or do not know how to install plugins, ask your web designer or seek out help on elance.com. Google analytics will show you exactly what's working, where your audience is coming from, what pages they are spending the most time on, conversions, and much MUCH more. Google has a pretty thorough tutorial index if you need some help.

Some other tools to help you monitor your online presence include:

• Google Help Page: Google also has this nifty help page for managing your online reputation. 
• Bitly: A way to track your outbound links - www.bitly.com
• Reputation.com: A helpful tool that monitors the web for content related to you, controls web search results, and helps you to create a positive and credible online image. - www.reputation.com
• Whos Talkin: A social media search tool that will allow you to browse results of any keyword - www.whostalkin.com
• BoardReader: A tool that lets you search forums for your name, business, or key words - www.boardreader.com
• SharedCount: A website that tallies how many times a URL was shared on what social networks - www.sharedcount.com
• Topsy: Realtime tracking of conversations across the web - www.topsy.com

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