Dave Carruthers sporadic and general musing from a tech entrepreneur

5 killer tips for protecting your personal reputation online

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.