Marketing
5 killer tips for protecting your personal reputation online
Monday, December 22nd, 2008 | Business, Marketing, Online Reputation Management | 1 Comment
What is more important than your reputation amongst your piers, from a business point of view not a lot, unless you have wealth beyond belief your personal reputation will massively affect your earning potential and your success in the business arena.
So how can you protect your personal reputation?
#1 Start a Blog and buy some domains
Starting a blog is easy and can be done completely free with no experience what so ever. Visit www.wordpress.com and register your blog name. Make sure you try and use your real name as your login and hyphenate or come up with a sensible alternative if it is not available, something like firstname-surname.wordpress.com is perfect.
If you do have a small budget and a little bit of technical expertise then it can pay dividends to buy your own personal domain name and host a blog there.
Search engines particularly Yahoo and Live will rank your personal domain name with almost no effort at all.
#2 Use you real name
Too many people comment on blogs with there online pseudonym bigballs6 and BoyRacer, why?
Unless you have something to hide use your real name, that way any time you comment on a blog, post to a forum, or get tagged in picture, that page is likely to be returned in Googles results when someone searches on your name.
There is a great post from Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz on the subject of personal branding
#3 Setup Profiles on Popular Professional Networking sites
The last 2 years has seen an explosion in social networking sites, with many of these sites now ranking well for Name searches. A good profile on these sites coupled with a blog and a few other little tricks can see you owning the front page of Google for any name searches particularly if you have a more unique name like Dave Carruthers
We would recommend setting up accounts on the following sites as a priority
1. Ecademy
2. LinkedIn
3. Xing.com
4. Naymz.com
5. LookupPage.com (They will even bid on your name with Google Adwords and by a personal domain name for $65 per year)
All of these sites contain alert systems so you know exactly when your profile has been viewed.
Once you have profiles on all these sites make sure you link them all together by adding links to your other profiles on each profile page, this well help them rank well in the search engines.
#4 Protect your Facebook/MySpace/Bebo/etc…account
People always say never mix business with pleasure and Facebook and My Space could not be better proof of that.
Make sure you make sure your account is locked down so only people you accept as friends can see your profile.
Do you really want your next employer or business partner to see pictures of what you and your mates got up to on Nobby’s stag doo – definitely not.
Lock it down and think about who you accept as a friend, as it may come back to haunt you.
#5 Its Twitter time
Twitter.com is a relatively new concept to many of microblogging but again choosing the right user name here is essential, choose your real name and that page will start to rank for name searches on Google.
To visit my twitter page checkout http://www.twitter.com/DaveCarruthers
Twitter is a great way to connect with like minded individuals in your industry, for ease of use I use TwitterFox to update my Twitter status.
Darren Rowse of ProBlogger fame has got a great blog with lots of tips on how to get started with Twitter
So that concludes my 5 killer tips to protecting you personal reputation online, if you have any questions or comments please do get in touch.
How to Bulk Follow on Twitter
Friday, November 21st, 2008 | Internet, Marketing | 7 Comments
If you have just joined Twitter then you have the daunting task of finding a community, well now there is an easy way thanks to a very cool tool from http://zbowling.com/code/twitter.html
Simply add your twitter username and password (the tool does not store this, but change your password after if worried) then paste the list of people you want to follow.
This nifty little tool allows you to add a whole bunch of influential people in your industy really easily. I would recommend that you fill in your bio and make 20-30 useful posts before attempting a bulk follow as you are more likely to get people following you in return if you look like a valuable member of the community.
To help get you started check out the links below.
Internet Marketers on Twitter
UK PRs on Twitter
UK Journalists on Twitter
Please feel free to add any other lists you find.
Google Launches Search Wiki – Customise your search results
Friday, November 21st, 2008 | Internet, Marketing | 1 Comment
Yesterday Google Launched SearchWiki a tool that allows you to manipulate search engine rankings for any keyword search just for searches you perform on Google. So for example if you type in Live Football Results you may actually want the result that is number 5 to come up as number 1, well now you can do this if you have a Google Account
Each search result now has a up and down arrow next to it allowing you to personalise your search results for any search term. Really taking search to a brand new level.
Even more powerful than that is the fact that you can now add any web page into the search results simply by going to the footer and clicking Add a result – see the screen shot below for an example where Audi now appear above BMW - I am sure you could play a couple of tricks on Corporate marketing departments with this one.
More importantly than all this is you can also see what other users have suggested or bumped up the search rankings for the search term you are looking at just by click See all notes for this SearchWiki.
It is going to be very interesting to see on where Google takes this technology and how much it will affect the natural search listings over time. In the same way sites like Digg and Sphinn take user votes and authority into consideration when ranking search results, is Google handing some of this power back to the Users is Google search going social?
What impact will this have one SEO as industry probably not much short term but long term it does pose some interesting questions.
Check out the SearchWiki demo by Google Engineer Amay below
Building a community using Twitter
Monday, November 10th, 2008 | Internet, Marketing | No Comments
Great blog post from Sarah Evans on Mashable about how to use Twitter to Build a Community.
This has got me thinking lots about how to best use twitter for me and my clients, so I have set a challenge to try and get 100 followers in 7 days.
Its Twittering time 