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Are you monitoring what’s said about you or your business online?  You should be! Tracking mentions of your name, website, or business name online allows you to find great feedback, make connections, and fix problems before they get out of control.

Customers will often share reviews (good or bad) on social sites, their blogs, or elsewhere online — but they don’t tell you directly.  With alerts setup, you can be notified and thank customers for good reviews, take quick action to resolve any sticky situations, and even find potential joint venture partners or affiliates and sites to guest blog or publish articles at.

Best of all, it takes only a few minutes to put the systems in place to monitor what’s being said online.  Here are 7 free services that can help by searching the web for your terms and sending you an email alert when they find a mention:

From the search engines:

• Google Alerts – http://www.google.com/alerts
• Yahoo! Alerts – http://alerts.yahoo.com

From the social networks:

• Social Mention – http://socialmention.com
• How Sociable – http://howsociable.com

From the blogosphere:

• Commentful by Blog Flux – http://commentful.blogflux.com
• Backtype – http://www.backtype.com/alerts

From everywhere:

• Notify.me – http://notify.me