Xavier Media®

This post is a re-written version of How to find out if someone is writing about you from AndreasBylund.com.

Do you know if someone is writing about you, your company or your web site? You can of course do a search in for example search engines like Google for your name or web site every now and then, but that requires a manual task. You also need to remember to search on a regular basis to find out if someone is writing for example lies about you. But don't worry because there's a better and easier way to find out what's going on on the Internet without having to manually search for specific keywords. Let Google Alerts do the job for you!

By using Google Alerts you can setup alerts for any search term you like and Google will let you know as soon as they find a new page or blog post with that search term. For example I got alerts setup for Xavier Media and yesterday I got an email from Google informing me that Chris Brandrick had mentioned Xavier Media in his blog at chrisbrandrick.com. Thanks to the alert I was able to post a comment 50 minutes after the post was created .

How do you setup alerts?

It's really easy and it's also a free service from Google! Simply visit www.google.com/alerts, click on sign in to manage your alerts and login to your Google account. If you don't have an Google account yet you can sign up for one by clicking on Create an account now.

When you have logged in you simply click on the button called “New Alert” to setup the alerts you need. Fill in your name as the search term and the rest of the details. You may want to use “” around your name so you only get results containing both your first name and last name and not only one of them.

I usually select as-it-happens for my alerts to get an email immediately when someone is writing about me. If you get a lot of articles written about you you could select for example once a day to not drown in emails. The down-side is that you only get notified once per day which means that you can't react within 50 minutes like I did in my example above.

Now your alert is setup and as soon as Google find a new page/article/blog post about you you will get an email with some text and the URL to the page about you. In this test example I got an email letting me know that Google found my own post about my trip to the Czech Republic. It took only about 15 minutes from the time I made the blog post until I got the alert email .

If you ever need to delete or change any of your alerts, then re-visit www.google.com/alerts or click on the links in the emails sent to you by Google.

About the author
Andreas co-founded Xavier Media® in 1996 and has since been involved in all kinds of development, marketing and making money online.