A fellow I know, Darren Slaughter, does good work helping contractors improve their websites to grow their businesses. Darren just came out with a new service that makes sense to me…Reputation Monitoring.

Now and in the future, many people will be finding you from a search engine. Maybe a satisfied customer tells a friend about your great service. The friend goes home, types some form of your name into a search engine and what comes up?

Hopefully it’s your professional website that helps convert this prospect to a customer. But maybe it’s a Forum where you get blasted or a bad Yelp review or a Facebook shaming.

To begin, do you utilize the free Google Alerts service? Just follow the link and set up several alert links for words and phrases folks may use to search for your company.  If you aren’t yet doing that, you should start today. You get an email for every hit to your selected word or phrase.

So Google Alert is a decent place to start, but many of these reputation killers won’t show up on Google Alerts. Facebook and Yelp postings won’t show up there and could be a problem for you.

Darren offers a $19/month service to provide a more thorough and contractor specific approach to Reputation Monitoring. You should certainly consider this service.

Look into the likely future and what do you see about how you will get work? Personal relationships will continue to be most important, but the internet will gain significance for many years to come. So make sure you aren’t left behind on internet marketing. Make sure you have an excellent web page and that you monitor your reputation.