Four Easy Ways To Protect Your Reputation Online

We put lot of effort into establishing our personal or small business brand online don’t we? However, if we are not working at the same time to ensure that we both manage and protect our online reputation then it could all be a waste of time.

There are certainly strategies you can adopt if you find yourself having to repair your brand and image online. However, the best way to protect your online reputation is to be proactive. There are a number of things that you can do that will help as a defense against any negative information which might appear on the internet and damage your reputation.

1: Create Profiles Everywhere

Ensure that you have created profiles in your own name, brand/business name on all the significant social networks. These sites include Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Pages, LinkedIn, Google+, Naymz and YouTube in particular.

You might also want to think about creating profiles on the major bookmarking and Question & Answer sites as well such as StumbleUpon and Yahoo Answers.

2: Register Your Personal Domains

Even if you aren’t ready to set up your own website or blog yet, make sure to register your name/business as a domain so that nobody else can claim it. You can use a domain registry like GoDaddy.com or Namecheap.com to register your domain. Do remember to make sure that you set it up so that it automatically renews each year.

You might also want to think about setting up blogs at WordPress.com, Blogger.com, and Tumblr.com. Even if you simply create a single page with some basic public information about yourself or your buisiness it’s worth claiming blogs in your name at these major sites.

Take a look at other sites in your market where people are active. Then make sure to set up profiles under your name there as well.

3: Check Your Privacy Settings

Many of the social media sites and other sites that you will possibly use will have privacy settings that you can amend. Make sure to heck them carefully to ensure you are only allowing appropriate information to be seen publicly.

As an example, you are able to set your Facebook profile privacy so that it hides your personal details from anyone other than people that you have chosen to add as friends. The same applies for sites like Picasa or other picture sharing sites, where people might find embarrassing photos that you’ll regret later.

4: Actively Engage and Publish

While you may have decided to set up profiles and accounts various online sites that doesn’t mean you have to be an active participant everywhere. After all there are only so many hours in the day and unless you have an army of little helpers, it would be all but impossible. What you neeed to do is be in the places where you need and want to be seen.

Choose the sites/places where your market or clients are spending time or where they go for information. You should make sure that you are really engaging with people on a regular basis. You should be seen answering and asking questions and not simply promoting yourself or your business. If there are specific types of sites which people in your market go to for information, make sure that you are creating content which has value and publishing it for everyone to read.

If you aim to protect your online reputation right from the start, then you can have control of at least some of the information that appears on the internet. If you make it more difficult for people to damage your reputation and keep up a steady flow of content, then you give yourself a significant edge against the type of people who might want to harm your reputation by badmouthing you or doing other things to damage your reputation.