Taking actions to protect your online reputation is a critical step in defending your business or your profession against detractors, competitors and other unscrupulous people who are trying to ruin your internet reputation using defamatory, negative or even untruthful remarks. Setting your system in place would be the first step in defending your reputation.

However, an integral part of reputation management is to be aware of your online reputation status at all times. You can do this by using available tools you can use to monitor your internet reputation. Note that Google or Yahoo search engine results are not the only resources you can use for this monitoring work. The following are some of the tools available that you can use, some are freely available while others offer premium services for a certain fee.  

* Blog Monitoring Tools -- these are very important monitoring tools that you can use to track down comments, conversations and other posts in blogs, social networks and social media that may contain keywords that are directly connected to you. These tools include:

                -- BackType Blog Comments Monitoring

                -- BlogPulse

                -- Google Blog Search

                -- Technorati

* Twitter Monitoring Tools -- tweets are short, quick but very viral avenues that can lift your reputation up or put you negatively down. The following are some of the readily available tools which you can use to monitor twitter content

                -- Monitter

                -- TweetBeep

                -- Tweet Later

                -- Twitter Search

* Link Monitoring Tools -- monitoring backlinks from tweets, blogs and website posts are important for your internet reputation management  efforts and you can use the following tools for this purpose.

                -- BackTweets

                -- WhoLinksToMe

                -- Google Webmaster Tools

* Other Monitoring Tools -- the following are other available tools which you can use for your internet reputation management monitoring needs:

                -- Google Alerts

                -- BoardTracker

                -- MonitorThis

                -- Naymz

                -- Purewire Trust

                -- Yasni

                -- BrandsEye

                -- Trackur