Here’s the final tip I promised yesterday on making money online. Spy! Spy on yourself and others who are making waves in your niche. I’ll explain how and why you should be doing this.

About 2 years ago I had some issues with my aweber account, where people who opted in to receive my ezine started to hit the spam link on the emails I sent. Yea.. guess who? AOL users! Even though I clearly stated in each email the date they subscribed and included an unsubscribe link. Nope… why would they remember they subscribed in the first place? Long story short.. I posted a gripe about aweber. Less than 24 hrs after I made that post I was contacted by aweber!

Obviously aweber was tracking who were making comments about them.

So why spy?

- you get to know who’s speaking about you.

- if it’s something negative, you’ll get the chance to clear-the-air if necessary. As in my experience with aweber, they took the time to explain why I was getting accused of spamming and took the time to show me how to avoid this from happening in the future. They put out a fire before it spread and saved the image of their business.

- by spying on your competition or those in your niche you’ll know what they’re up to. Maybe it’s a blog post someone wrote about them, a new product launch or worst case.. they’re bad mouthing you.

- keep tabs on a company to know when they’re expanding so you can contact them in regards to vacant positions.

How do I go about spying?

The easiest way to start keeping track of things, is via Google Alerts. I’m sure there are many ways you can do keyword tracking, but this option is very simple to get started and it’s free.

Here’s how it works..

- enter a search term (this will be whatever you want to spy on)

- then chose where you want to search (Type). I normally use comprehensive.

- how often (I use as it happens)

- then enter your email address.

- you’ll then receive an email to confirm that you’ve requested the alerts. Confirm and you’re done.

Every time the word you entered is mentioned on the internet, you’ll get an email from Google Alerts showing the link where it was used. It’s that simple.

I’m sure you can find various other uses for Google Alerts.. like setting up alerts on companies that you can track to see when they start hiring. Or how about job titles.. “hiring virtual assistant” etc? Now bear in mind that the more broad your keywords are, there’s the chance that you’ll be flooded with irrelevant results.

Leave me your comments, maybe you have a better use for spying or a unique tool?

Are you tuned in to the Olympics? We’re a sporting family (some of us participate and others support) so we’re glued to the boob-tube every night. I’ll have some comments in another post about my thoughts on the Canadian team and their quest for “personal best”. Frig, Mongolia and Uzbekistan are on the medal table and not Canada. Nothing against either countries >> shaking my head from side to side <<