It’s Your Name. Take Control of It.

Your brand is your business. If you haven’t claimed it online, you cannot have control over it.

Here are 5 ways to take control of your brand:

Set up Google profile

Google recently rolled out a new program, Google Profiles, that allows you to set up your own profiles that will be displayed at the search engine result page when anyone “Googles” your name. To begin using Google Profile, you’ll need a Google account (free). If you’re using Gmail, then you already have an account with Google.

1. While registering, mention your full name in order to get a Google Profile URL.
2. Check the “Display my full name so I can be found in search” option while changing your Google profile.
3. Include more information about you – links to blogs and social network profiles – and make it descriptive and specific as possible to get higher rankings.

Make your brand available on social networks

Aside from having a website, blogs, and Google Profile, make sure to create a profile on most popular social networking sites. Use knowem.com or Namechk.com to check on which social networking sites your brand name is available and claim it now before anyone does it.

In addition to creating your brand profiles, these sites will keep track of your brand mentions on popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, and plenty others so that you know right away who is talking what about you online.

Create a central place

Besides using free tools to monitor your online reputation, you could also create a central hub where people from all over the Internet could merge and know more about you and what you do.

For example, you can create a personal website where people could visit to learn what services you offer, what you’re expert at, or read more blog posts, tips and tricks on your trade. As your brand starts to become popular, most people will start to visit this section, comment on it, share with their connections, and basically become your own virtual marketer.

Make sure to include your brand name because it makes people easy to figure out where they are, instead of making them confused and watch them walk away. While choosing a brand name, make it short, sweet, and memorable.

Keep track of your online reputation management

A single person can either make or break your brand online, whether they are your employees or a competitor. A negative comment, mention, or review can spread the online media in a matter of minutes, and if you do not have an online reputation strategy to keep track of all these mentions, soon you’ll not only lose your customers, but will be out of the business forever.

Have you sign up for Google alerts or use search.twitter.com to see what are being said about you and your brand right now? Do you have a strategy in place on how to react to negative comments from anyone online? Do you know how to handle negative comments, reviews, and in a polite and assertive way, or do you simply respond back being aggressive?

If someone says positive thing about you, you must at least say “Thank you!” in a way that could land you another customer. On the other hand, if someone writes something negative that is not true, you’ll need to contact them personally and find ways to resolve the issue in a positive way.

Promote Your Expertise

In order to get attention from people who might be interested on what you have to offer, you’ll have to make them see, hear, and feel you. Setting up a site or a blog could be one of the ways to get noticed in front of targeted audience, but there are several alternatives to take control of your name online.

For example, you could create a social media profile, probably something like Facebook fan page, or profiles on Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn to share what you have to bring on the table – i.e. your unique experiences, talents, and skills to people who might be interested in.

In your personal branding campaign, there are plenty of ways to get your experience out there, including social media resume, twtjobs (twittering your resume), and LinkedIn posts, Facebook status, among others.

It’s your brand name and are you taking control of it? If not, you must, starting today.

Choose Your URL Carefully

Search engine looks to more than 100 different ranking factors to rank your website and one of those ranking factors is the URLs of your website.

How to choose your URL carefully so that it is easily understood by search engine robots and display them when other people search for them?

Well, you see your website URL plays an important role to rank your website higher in search engines. These days, many website has a feature that allows their owners to customize their website URL and make it SEO-friendly.

Unlike complex URLs like “page?php=1323404,” SEO-friendly URLs are descriptive that will help search engine robot to understand what your page is about so that it can serve as a relevant content when people look for it.

But we still find a lot of website still using the same old vague URLs on their pages and no matter how great their content is, their pages still do not pop up in search engine result pages when people look for it.

So you see it’s very important to choose your URL carefully.

With that said, let’s look at how you can create SEO-friendly URLs for your web pages on your site.

How to Choose Your URL Carefully:

Use major keywords in the URL

While creating a URL for your web pages, try to find out the major keywords of your niche and use it. If your keywords are on the URLs, search engines will display your site over others who don’t optimize their URLs.

Note: Basically, the URLs of the web page are same as the title of the page.

Drop signs from the URLs

The next thing to remember while crafting a SEO-friendly URL is to drop signs like question mark (?), period (.), exclamation mark (!), and other wildcard characters from the URL. These signs aren’t understood by search engine robots, so do not use them in your URLs, although it could be in the title of the page.

Achieve a Balance

It’s tempting to use a long URLs with plenty of keywords on it hoping to rank every search term for a single page, but please do avoid it. It is considered as “spam” and Google will penalize your site if it finds about it.

Try to use those keywords into your content instead and choose only major keywords on the URL.

If you need to insert other major keywords, create a separate page for it and include link between different pages. This way, everything seems natural and you’ll avoid your site from being dropped from rankings, too.

Bonus Tip: Use Hyphens (-) Instead of Underscores (_)

Do not use underscores to separate the words in the URLs because search engines “reads” underscores, while they completely ignore slashes and hyphens.

Google’s Tools for Online Reputation Management

Have you utilized “Me on the Web” tool that Google recently added into their dashboard along with the analytics and account links? If not, then you probably should as it was designed to help you monitor your online reputation easily.

It’s been clear than Google favors websites that are popular among its users.

“Online reputation isn’t always about what you post on your site, but it is also how others think about you and your posts as shown by the reply, likes, and sharing of your posts on the Internet,” shares Google.

To keep track of these mentions, there’s a link on the Google account dashboard called “Me on the Web.” Just use this features to set up an alert whenever people mentions something about your blog posts.

Setting up alerts for online mentions isn’t a new thing as there was a method to achieve the same result, although it was lengthy and cumbersome. Now, with the introduction of “Me on the Web” tool, you can easily set up an alert within few clicks.

In addition, if you wanted to improve your online identity and delete unnecessary content, you can easily do so using this new tool.

Now that you know Google’s tools for online reputation management, let’s look at how to use it.

Here’s how to set up the Google’s tools for online reputation management:

1. First of all, search yourself on the net. Type your name on Google and see what information pops up in the resulting page.
2. Create a Google profile. To setup a Google profile, you’ll need to create an account with Google (free). Through the Google profile, you can fill up information about you such as your contact details, bio, and any other information that people may want to know about you. In addition, you can also link your Google profile to other sites that is about you, such as a link to your site/blog(s), social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, etc.
3. Remove content you don’t want others to see. If there’s an embarrassing image of you, let’s say your friends tagged an image of you in a binge party that you do not want others to see, you can do so through “photo visibility section.” If the search result still displays after using this feature, you can completely remove the page from Google’s search results.
4. Set up an alert system to notify you when a mention appears on the net. If someone posts your name, or an email address, and it gets published online, you may want to get notifications of it. The “Me on the Web” feature will help you figure out all the information that is about you on the net.

Most people often visit Google to look for information pertaining to you. The above steps will help you set up Google’s tools for online reputation management and help you be in control of what other people see you on the web.

Tell us about your point of view – Did some of your friends tagged a photo of you on Facebook, or mentioned something you don’t want others to see, but it appeared on the search engine result? How did you remove those unwanted content from displaying in search engine result?

Please comment below!

Better Days for Your Blog Posts?

Blogging is a powerful tool that helps your business grow. Unlike small Facebook and Twitter statuses updates, long content like blogs become very powerful tool to engage, raise awareness, and influence their buying decisions.

According to eMarketer, “One in every three companies uses blogs for marketing purpose.”

Likewise, in 2011, HubSpot’s reported that most companies found blog to be more effective and important tool, almost 62% better, than any other social media sites to market and reach their target audience.

So you see, blogs are seen as information hubs for many companies and individuals who want to dominate their niche online. Blog is an important content marketing strategy that will convince your potential customers to land on your website, read your content, and then, finally, share them to their connections on social media sites if they like what you have published there.

But when more than thousands of blog that gets published, and now mainstream media coming into the picture, how will your blog posts see its better days?

Here are few tips to remember to see better days for your blogs posts:

Identify and Understand Your Niche

What is the unique selling point (USP) of your industry? How are your blog content unique and how effectively it delivers the type of information people are searching for than any other blogs out there? How your blog does serves the purpose of giving what is in demand, as identified by keyword research, and topical (social) issues?

Whether you’re just starting out a new blog, or disheartened with the performance of your blogging efforts, following a coordinated marketing approach that that will increase your company’s ability to offer what people are looking for, talk what they’re talking about, and be a source of inspiration.

Result? You’ll automatically dominate your niche as all important credibility points directly to your site.

Optimize Blogs with Niche Specific Keywords

Once you’ve identified your niche, the next big thing you can do is to do keyword research to find a list of right keywords that you can craft content around. Using free keyword tools such as Google Keyword Planner will allow you to find keywords that are profitable, or keywords that are easy to rank for, most probably long tail keyword, and create blog posts around it.

Long tail keywords are more specific, and long, and have less competition, which means you can quickly rank for these long keyword phrases than going after short generic keywords that are way too competitive to rank for.

Focus on driving traffic through long tail keyword first and you’ll see best days for your blog posts.

Separate yourself from the competition

Whom would you contact if you wanted to get a stylish hairstyle for an upcoming event? Certainly a barber, and not a dress designer, isn’t it?

To be specific, who would you rather choose – a generic hairdresser or a specialized hairstylist – for a wedding procession? Of course, you’d choose a specialized hairstylist as wedding is a grand event in your life and you certainly do not want to settle anything less than the best.

So you see, direct marketing is similar! If you want to see your blog posts to see its best days, start to write highly specific content that serves a particular group of audience.

Utilize Google Authorship

Google Authorship tool allows you to display your picture, or avatar, or logo, or any other brand image, next to search results. Having a brand image next to your blog posts on search engine result pages (SERPs) allows you to communicate confidently with your target audience by seen as an authority figure in your niche.

Promote Your Content on Social Networking Sites

After posting content on your website, include a brief summary of your posts on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YoutTube (create videos), and LinkedIn, etc. When you spread your content on social media sites, it gives another source to bring people who might be interested to what you have to offer, and increase engagement, and hopefully, online conversion.

So, you see, setting up a social profile isn’t enough. You need to engage your target audience by posting relevant content on a regular basis to engage them to see better days for your blog posts.

SEO Facts and Figures

If your site/blog isn’t ranking higher in search engines and driving the amount of traffic to it, you are probably doing SEO wrong. Most entrepreneurs, especially those who do not understand the importance of SEO for their business, simply build their website in a rush and hope that offline marketing like worth of mouth will give them a competitive advantage over others.

With search engine listings, any business has a potentially bring thousands, if not millions, of free traffic (potential customers) to your website. With search engines like Google, any startup can outperform giant companies who spend millions of dollars to rank in the first page.

With that said, we thought you might be interested to learn some of the SEO facts and figures so that you understand how important it is today to be in the online sphere for a long time.

SEO facts and figures you do not want to miss:

1. Websites that aren’t optimized for search engines will not be found on the Internet.
2. If you need your website to be on the 1^st page, you’ll have to perform keyword research to find profitable keywords that are worth targeting after.
3. Almost 85% of search engine users look at the top 10 results on the 1^st page.
4. By placing keywords in the meta description, keyword, or title tags will list your site on search engines for that keyword
5. To optimize your website, you’ll have to remember two things – on-page SEO (optimizing content on your site) and off-page SEO (optimizing your content outside your own site).
6. Blackhat SEO methods such as keyword stuffing (inserting keywords all over the page to influence rankings) and link farming (posting content on low quality sites) will get your website penalized, and at worst, banned.
7. Hiding text or links into your pages will boost page rank, however, if caught; it will get you banned from search engine result.
8. Flash based sites aren’t indexed properly on search engines database.
9. You need to post fresh content if you want to keep your website ranking where it is now, or even higher.
10.  More than 73% people use search engines to purchase products.
11.  More than 70% users click on organic links instead of paid advertisement seen at the sidebar of most search engines.
12. More than 81% of businesses think that setting up a blog is an important asset.

Over to you! Have you optimized your website for search engines? What steps do you take to optimize your website and its content? Please comment below!

Teamwork. A Right Fit with Your SEO Consultant.

SEO is probably one of the ways to reach out to your “target” audience. Yes, SEO is the process of optimizing the site, its content, and then spread all over the Internet to build backlinks to generate FREE traffic back to your site.

Most small business thinks in terms of traffic and rankings, only. Well, traditional SEO techniques may help you get plenty of traffic and increase your ranking, but if you sell yourself short, like most small business do, your business may survive and make some profits, but it won’t thrive.

Traditional SEO techniques will help you survive your business and make some profits, but after you achieve this goal, you really won’t get motivated to take your business to the next level, do you?

In order to great results, your business cannot solely depend on traditional SEO methods to gain traffic and conversions. It has to go beyond it, using modern SEO tactics, to separate you from the crowd and reap all the rewards.

Your business has a focus on building a brand itself, just like great companies like Nike, Samsung, Coca-Cola, and Apple!

Brand helps build “trust” among your visitors as well as search engines. A branded company is conceived to be serious in their business endeavors, they’re more concerned about their reputation and the quality of products and services they deliver to grab hold of loyal customers and be different from the crowd and take away all their customers.

Well, the last part was little harsh, but in order to dominate your niche, you’ll have to give your business a unique image, or brand. Modern SEO tactics helps build a strong brand of your business which is based on your vision, mission, and long-term goals. These SEO campaigns are completely customized according to the needs and requirement of a particular business and their goals and how they want to be perceived to their clients.

Although building a brand may take a lot more resources than just increasing site rankings and driving traffic to it, but trust us, in the end, all your investment is worth the effort. Not only will you build a loyalty of your customers by coming across as an industry expert, but your core competitions as well. This core competition (or strengths) will help you focus on what you’re best at and then deliver those goods to customers who are interested in.

We can help you develop a brand for your business.

So, coming back to your question, “What key element will be right fit with my SEO consultant?” the answer would be – teamwork!

You need to team up with your SEO consultant, and treat them like your business partner, to help them better understand you, your business, its vision, and other short-term and long-term goals so that they can develop a customized SEO and online marketing campaigns to develop the kind of image/brand you want to project your existing as well as potential customers.

If you’re only after search engine rankings and driving traffic to your business, then teamwork may not be important. However, if you’ve a long-term vision for your business and know exactly how you want to come across the eyes of your customers, then you seriously need to consider teaming up with your SEO consultant.

Interested to separate yourself from the crowd by offering unique products and services to your clients?

Contact us to discuss how we can help a brand for your business, now!

99% Hardwork. 1% Luck.

Years of consistent hard work/effort towards a goal will more likely produce the kind of result you’re after, rather than simply depending upon your luck.

Don’t trust me? Well, just ask any successful people, and their answer would be, “I was passionate about this subject and started on this career while growing up. Sometimes, I had to spend 18 hours, and sometimes no sleep at all to get the kind of result I am getting.”

Okay, but does that mean you need to spend 20 hours/day to get the kind of success for your business? Not necessarily!

You see, success is the result of doing thing properly and continuously. Having said that, you definitely do not have to spend hours on your computer to get the web design right, or produce quality content, or spend thousands of dollars on your SEO campaigns.

You just need to do things that work for your business! And to discover that, you’ll have to do all sorts of things – website analysis, keyword analysis, site visitor analysis, etc – to figure out what really works and which elements are unnecessary.

How does it relate with small business SEO success?

Your business is no different than any other thing you do in your life. In order to see better results, high ROI, you’ll have to invest time, energy, and resources into it.

For example, the web design needs to be visually attractive to grab people’s attention, and provide high quality content (information) they’re looking for. In addition, these content needs to help solve their problems.

But having an attractive design and useful content isn’t a surefire ways to propel you to online success. You have to promote your website and become visible to your target audience to see results.

But most small businesses make the mistake of overlooking the online marketing of their site. They simply hope that someone will find their site on the Internet without even ranking in the top 10 positions in search engines for some major keywords of their niche.

That’s when SEO comes in!

Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing your website to rank it higher in search engine to drive more traffic to it. But before optimizing your site and its content based on keyword phrases, you’ll also have to be sure these keywords are worth targeting for.

You see, tens of thousands of websites, if not millions, competing against each other to rank in the 10 top position on Google. Most small business make the mistake of targeting highly competitive keywords first, and no wonder, they never see the ranking of their pages rise. In order to rank quickly and drive traffic to your site, you have to go after “profitable” keywords for your business.

Keyword analysis will help generate profitable keywords list in your niche. Profitable keywords are keyword phrases that have low competition but high search volume. So, unless you’re using a paid SEO campaign (PPC campaign) to drive traffic to your site, then you’ll have to target these low competitive keywords first to rank quickly in the top 10 position on search engines, otherwise, your business is doomed to fail.

Once you have a list of profitable keywords, then only you optimize your site (design and content) around it so that when people use those keyword terms, your pages are displayed on the search result pages. The higher the relevance of the content, higher the page ranking will be..

Besides on-page SEO, there is still another vital step towards increasing your website rankings, and that is, off-page SEO.

Off-page SEO deals with building quality link to your site from high PR (well-established and popular) sites relevant to your niche. Google gives 1 vote of approval when your site includes a link back from a popular website. The more inbound links you have on your pages, the higher your web page(s) will rank.

The best way to get free backlinks from high authority sites is to write quality content that are engaging, original, and informative, and post it on relevant blogs, forums, article directories, press releases, Web 2.0 sites, and RSS, along with a link to the landing page on your site.

In addition, backlinks has to come from various sources and appear natural. Do not try to game search engines by submitting your posts on “link farms” just to get tons of backlinks. This is against Google policy and if you’re caught using black hat SEO tactic, not only they’ll drop your site from rankings, but also completely ban your site from displaying in search result pages.

So, there’s a lot of hard work that’s involved to get you to the top 10 position on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

If you do not have time and knowledge to optimize your site and generate content to build backlinks, hire a professional SEO consultant to do all these small tasks for you so that you can focus on other important aspects of your business, like making new connections, launching a new product, or venturing into new business opportunity.

Would you like us to give you a FREE no-obligation SEO consultation for your website? Contact us to get started.

How to SEO Your Way to Online Success in Your Industry.

Do you want to take your small business to the next level? Have you thought about SEO? Well, if you haven’t, we’re here to tell you that proper SEO strategies can help transform your business in number of ways – increase search engine rankings, create a strong brand, get more organic (free) traffic to your website, and ultimately, give you high ROI.

Aren’t these important goals keeps you going on a regular basis? If there are others, please mention it in the comment section below.

But as of writing this article, we bet you are motivated by one of the above key goals. That is why we have decided to share you some SEO secrets to help transform your business ideas into a reality.

7 Ways to Online Success in Your Industry:

But before I let you in with all these well-kept SEO secrets, let me be clear with one thing.

Even if you’re outsourcing most of your business task from a spare bedroom in a rented house, with the Internet, you can actually take a lot of customers away from huge brands, and make them your own.

How? Just get in-front of your “target” audience. The best part is that SEO is the only available tool to help you get there. Got your attention? Okay, with that said, let us show how SEO can help you reach out to more clients and take away customers from bigger companies.

Explore New Markets/Industries

Even though you may be living in California, it doesn’t mean that you cannot sell your products and services to people who reside in UK, or even Australia, any other part of the world.

All you have to do is reach out to them!

With proper search engine optimization (SEO), reaching out to people becomes possible – i.e. your website and pages lands on the 1^st page of Google with proper SEO.

Related article: SEO is here to Save Your Day

Establish Trust to Drive More Traffic

If you’ve read our previous article, “Top 5 SEO Statistics for SMEs,” then you’ll realize that almost 80% of online users use search engines like Google to find YOU.

So, if one or more of your website (pages) are in the 1^st page of Google, that means more people will “trust” your website as they know only “trustworthy” and “valuable” sites rank on the top 10 position of search engines.

You may be residing in any part of the globe, but you still have the opportunity to use the power of SEO to prove your trust to search engines.

Make Your Website More Accessible to Your Visitors

Internet users have short span of attention, and if you cannot grab their attention within first few seconds, they’ll probably be off to your competitor’s site.

However, when you’re working closely with an experienced SEO consultant, they’ll offer their “advise” on how to make your website more “accessible” and “useful” to your visitors.

Use SEO tactics to Promote Your Business

Having an “eye-catching” and “professional-looking” web design and “useful” content becomes meaningless if it doesn’t drive traffic to it. People won’t be able to find you and inquire about your products and services if they can’t see you online.

It’s extremely important to invest in a “responsive” and “user-friendly” website, but if you are not going to reach out to your target audience, you won’t make money through it. SEO is a simple yet effective tool to promote your business to “right” audience.

Invest on SEO

As many would like to say, SEO isn’t an expensive investment. Most of the work like site optimization and on-page optimization can be done by you. In addition to the basic SEO, getting the help of a professional SEO consultant will also help you make more money than you’ll invest.

If you’re skeptic about investing on SEO at first, think about paying after results as many SEO companies offer this guarantee as part to establish trust with their clients. In the end, there’s only to gain and nothing to lose.

Get Ranked for Major Keywords for Permanent Results

No matter what niche/industry you’re in, it pays to rank for certain major keywords in the top 10 position of major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. They’re not only inexpensive, but they’re also permanent. It takes a lot of time and effort to beat a website that’s on top 10 results of a search engine page.

On the other hand, print ads on newspapers will only bring you short-term benefits for your business.

Once one of your web pages rank in the 1^st page of Google, of course, you’ll have to consult your SEO consultant to keep them there, which will continue to provide higher ROI. But failing to continue SEO campaign long after you’ve ranked on the top 10 position can be disastrous to your business.

Optimize website to beat your competitions

After ranking for few major keyword phrases, do not stay idle thinking you competitors won’t. Your competitors maybe be targeting for keywords that you may not have. As a result, they will take away your customers right under your nose.

So, make sure to do SEO to you website to get there in the 1^st page for major keywords in your niche. If you cannot, consider hiring a professional SEO consultant for your business.

Get a FREE SEO consultation to discuss your SEO requirements for your business, now.

Let us discuss, in the comment below, how SEO can help drive your online business to the next level!

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8 Ways to Manage Your Online Reputation

Online reputation management (ORM) is the “lifeline” of your business!

Although we may NOT care what other people think of all the small things, but overall, we still want to be “respected,” “liked,” and “thought well of,” in a deeper level, don’t we?

So, here are 8 creative ways to manage your online reputation to shine your business, attract new clients, and build trust and engage your customers, starting today!

1. Start a Blog

People who generally post blog on their field are perceived as those interested and passionate about what they’re doing. This will eventually help them attract more visitors as they’re more likely to listen to someone interested in what they’re doing over someone who’s just in for a quick buck.

So make sure to post helpful, informative, and interesting blog topics that reflect you’re your personal vision, mission, interests, and passion in life.

In addition, share your wisdom and engage people by commenting on other blogs.

Related article: Blog your way to the top

2. Establish Yourself as an Industry Expert

If you’re an industry expert, more people is going to trust you and your offers. Similarly, search engines such as Google will also display your site over other “spammy” websites when you have a strong online reputation.

So begin sharing your ideas through blogging, or comment on posts that you are knowledgeable about to show that you care especially if you want to be associated with others too. Having a mutual and long conversation will affect your website positively on search engine results, thereby placing your site higher among other search results that are idle and static.

3. Keep Your Website Updated and Polished

A clean, professional-looking and well-maintained website is crucial in today’s competitive age, regardless of the size and type of your business. No, we are NOT asking you to spend hundreds of dollars to make it fancy or big, but it has to be updated and accurate.

4. Express Your Technical Know How

A business that still utilizes outdated technology is generally perceived as outdated. In this information and technology driven society, being “Internet savvy” and “techy” is vital to your online success and coming across as capable and competent business.

So do us a favor – update your mobile devices, computers, email, printers, software, website and media pages.

5. Be an Effective Communicator

Keep your messages, letters, and voicemails brief and to the point. Make sure to include your contact information even if your recipient has it. Check for spelling and grammars. Ensure you include your business information – your full name, business name, location, toll free number, phone, website URL, hours of operation – on prominent locations on your website.

6. Be Calm and Positive Whenever Possible

Reputation management is not just about limiting your online damage, but also taking proper steps to improve your business, brand, and even how you work. Every successful entrepreneur make mistakes, but they quickly place new set of actions to prevent it from occurring again.

Say sorry, think ways to improve your services, let your people know how your services are going to improve, and send an email to your clients telling them that you’ve taken time to listen to their requests/complaints.

Suddenly, all those complaints and problems will turn into a selling point.

7.  Develop Reliability and Responsiveness (R&R)

It’s important to develop your online reputation for reliability and responsiveness by setting strict rules for communication.

For example, if there are any complaints, resolve them quickly. If you delayed your service or made a blunder, don’t try to cover it. Instead, own it and take proper steps to fix it, quickly. If need be, send an “apology” letter.

A complaining client will become your greatest asset when complaints are solved effectively and quickly. In addition, your online reputation benefits too.

8. Respect Privacy

Protect sensitive information such as credit cards by utilizing secure URLs. In addition, create a privacy policy page on your website ensuring them that you won’t use their email address and name other than sending out information to them. Likewise, you may also want to have a discussion on sensitive issues (financial transaction, for example) on a separate place.

 

Go on! Tell us how you manage your online reputation. Please, comment below!

 

5 Hot Tips to Brand Yourself Online

Internet has become the ultimate cost-effective and convenient tool to build a strong brand and market your business. Whether you are looking to establish new relationships, or looking for new clients, or seeking new job opportunities, the Internet is the “place to be” if you want to get quick results.

When it comes to branding yourself on the Internet, the first thing you need to do is create a strong foundation on which you can build something.

In this article, we’ll discuss top 5 ways you can brand yourself so that you can be more presentable with your targeted audience and become impressive in their eyes so that they’ll trust and feel comfortable doing business with you.

5 Hot Tips to Brand Yourself Online:

1. Create Your Own Personal Website

As important as it is to insert social media profiles like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ into your personal brand, ensure that you also have a personal website. No, it doesn’t have to be flashy or expensive website. In fact, having 5 to 7 simple pages on WordPress, Blogspot, or Webs.com is sufficient to make your personal brand stronger, and hopefully than your competitors.

Just ensure that you use a powerful and original headers with logo and slogan (tagline) that will help your brand stand out from the crowd.

Once you’re set up your own site, make sure you incorporate social media tools to drive and attract traffic from your social connection and into your site in hope that people get interested in what you’re doing and plan to achieve.

2. Set up Blog

Once you’ve created a website, the next thing you can do is set up a blog on your site or on its own separate domain. Again, you do NOT have to create in-depth blog posts every couple of hours or every day. Just a weekly post that includes simple text and few multimedia (images, audios, and videos) will do.

Use this blog post as a way to drive traffic to your main website where you offer product, services, and offers to those who might be interested in what you have to offer.

3. Get Social

Now that you have your website and blog ready, it’s time to get social. While it’ not necessary to use every new social media that comes on, it’s still worth using popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.

There are free plugins available on WordPress.com to help you with this, even if you do NOT have any programming experience. Set it up once and you’re done. It’s that simple!

Make sure you post positive, interesting, and humorous status on these social media profiles. Remember, the whole world is watching you out there. A negative or outrageous status can either help or ruin your personal brand for a long time.

Before hitting the publish button, make sure you double check everything before sending out your thoughts out into the world.

4. Network, network, and Network

Networking is very beneficial to establish yourself as a strong brand. Not only you’ll get to know each other through networking, but you’ll also help grow your business through the “word of mouth” marketing. Your networks are the best people for your business. They’ll help you stay in the business when nothing seems to be happening.

Anyone could be in your network, though.

They could be your friends, families, co-workers, or a random stranger. If they are aware of what you do and offer, they’ll help refer your business to those people who are seeking it, absolutely free.

So make sure you try to actively engage them with a personal message by picking up a phone and giving a call just to say “how was their day?” and “have their recent purchase helped solved their problems?” So do NOT hesitate to respond back your visitor’s messages, comments, and social media status, regularly.

5. Spread Your Message, Everywhere!

Branding is more psychological than simply a marketing strategy – you’ll have capture people’s mind. The more you do it, the more exposure you’ll give your brand in front your users (social connections, readers, and customers), and longer it will stick to their head.

Use your website, logo, and blog post in many different places as possible.

For example, include your website URLs on your email signatures. Talk about your business on relevant forums and include URLs in the resource box (free marketing). Write guest blog posts on other relevant blogs and include an URL and name as the byline. Buy an ad banners and advertise on Google Adwords via PPC campaign.