It has been mentioned before, online marketing is like a big popularity contest. When you enter a popularity contest (since you’re probably in to SEO, you already have), you’ll want to know your score. The score for your company and/ or website isn’t very hard to track. Just monitor your rankings, visitors, sales, subscribers or whatever you consider as a score. But how do you measure the popularity of your personal brand? Easy, use search ads. This is also very useful to serve people who search for your name the page that you want them to see.

Have you been busy creating some personal buzz lately? Monitor how often your name is being Googled or Yahoo’ed. Create your own Google Trends. You can easily determine how often people were searching for you (or a username you use), by checking the amount of impressions your ad received. It has to be said that, unlike in real life, having a weird name pays off when you use this strategy. Can you imagine dozens of people with really uncommon names like this? If your name is Mike Johnson, it’s harder to determine if people are looking for you or for that other Mike.

If you don’t want to invest in tracking yourself (which I can’t imagine), you can also let others do it for you. Did you know that there are two services (I know of) that place ads to a page you create for free? I haven’t tested them out, but I’m pretty sure they can be useful to some.