Welcome to another installment of 10-minute branding!

10-Minute Branding Refresher: How do you build your brand 10 minutes at a time? You start small, and you simply begin. An excellent way to convince yourself to get going is to plan your ending. You can even set a timer. Then, be sure to bask in the success of your huge accomplishment of actually beginning and also appreciate the amount of work that got done. Then, repeat the process tomorrow. And the next day. And so on. You will be amazed at your branding progress . . . 10 minutes at a time.

While you need to know where your business stands in the world according to google, because that is how most prospective customers will try to get to know you, the process doesn’t need to be work intensive (even for 10-minute branding standards). With google alerts, you designate how often you would like google to send you an email with a summary of new search results for your selected keywords. That leaves you with the not-so-lofty challenge of quickly skimming the email upon receipt. However, you do have to go through the process of setting up the alerts. Since our philosophy is think small in order to achieve big, we would recommend breaking up the tasks into a couple of days since the process overall is probably more than 10 minutes. . . .

Day 1: Finish reading this post. 😉

Day 2: Decide on the keywords for your alerts. At a most basic level, you would want your name (because to some degree, you are your business); your business name; and possibly your business name followed by the word ‘review’. Beyond that, would some other topics be useful to track for the sake of your business? Maybe you want to keep an eye on the competition. Maybe a particular current event is relevant to your business. Make a list for yourself.

Day 3: Set up the alerts. (You’ll need to have a google account for the task, so if you don’t have one, know that you’ll be prompted to create one before your alerts go live.)

Go to google.com/alerts and enter your first set of keywords along with your email address. Consider entering quotes around your keywords to limit your results and click “show options” to set the parameters for your search (like frequency, language, etc.). Click “create alert” once done and repeat the process as many times as needed.

Easy Peasy!

Then, you’ll see what the world sees, and you can proactively address issues as they arise.

Note that google does not track social media references unfortunately. Those need to be addressed separately.

Let me know of any questions or comments below. Till next time!