How to Start Managing Your Online Reputation

Managing your online reputation isn’t something that just large companies and celebrities need to worry about. Instead it’s something everyone should think about and consider. When someone searches your name in Google, what will they find? Hopefully it’s all good… but you never know when something bad might show up in the search results. Trying to visit Google every day to see if anything new is ranking isn’t “reputation management” at all. In fact, it can actually be a waste of time and end up hurting your end results in the long run.

So what is the best way for you to start managing your own online reputation without needing to spend hours everyday and blowing your budget in the process!

How to Start Managing Your Online Reputation

In this post we are going to highlight a few ways that you can start performing your own reputation management while also building a plan around your personal or business name to make sure you are prepared if any negative attacks do come your way. Many of these methods are free or low cost and you can start implementing them right away.

1.) Setup Google Alerts and Monitor Your Name Mentions

One of the easiest ways to start monitoring your reputation online is to setup a free Google Alerts account. By setting up this free tool you will receive an email every time your personal or business name is mentioned anywhere on the internet. While the tool isn’t perfect, it is free and it’s a great way to get started with your own ORM.

2.) Register Your Domain Names Now

If someone is going to build a web site or post content on the internet to try and destroy your personal or business name, there is a good chance they are going to try to do it with a domain name. A good way to prevent this and negative attacks is by registering multiple domain variations with your name in it. This includes all generic variations of your personal and business name in .com, .net and .org format. You will also want to secure the following domain names which are commonly used in negative attack campaigns – “YourBrandSucks.com”, “YourBrandReviews.com” and any other variations of “Your Brand” + “negative keywords” you might be able to come up with. Domain names are only $10 a year and buying these names now can dave you a lot of money and headaches down the road.

3.) Place Your Best Content on Your Own Sites

Online reputation management is all about knowing what is ranking on the first page of results for your personal or brand name, but it’s also about having ownership over all of these rankings as well. Don’t send your customers to Yelp to post reviews. The best way to prevent negative attacks from appearing in the top pages of the search results for your name is to make sure all of your sites are already ranking. Creating sites with your own content based around your name, reviews, contact information and customer feedback is a great way to build content for your sites while also potentially ranking for many different key terms and phrases for your name or brand. Why would you want to send your valuable customers and their reviews to build up another site that you have no power over? You wouldn’t, so focusing on using authentic reviews on your own sites.

4.) Create Social Profiles on Top Sites

Another excellent way to improve your listings in the first page of Google is to create social profile pages for both your personal and business name. These high profiles networks include such sites as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Completed.com. Since these sites already have a massive following and very powerful rankings in Google, it will be quite easy to rank these profiles for personal and company names. Best of all, these pages are completely free to setup and they are a great way to increase exposure for yourself and allowing you to engage with your followers and customers in the process.

Reputation Management Comes in Many Different Forms

As you can see, there are plenty of ways for you to start managing your online reputation. This can be quite a time consuming and complicated process, but you can make it much easier by signing up for a free account to the Brand.com Command Center. From this area you will be able to monitor brand name mentions, track your reputation performance and also view full reports on the movement in the search results and more.

Managing your online reputation doesn’t have to become a full time job. The sooner you start, the better chances you have for disaster control if/when something negative does come your way.

via Business 2 Community http://www.business2community.com/branding/start-managing-online-reputation-0661230?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=start-managing-online-reputation