Purifying Your Online Reputation

In business and in life, before you can be a good “anything else,” you must be a good human being. You must speak kindly, help other people and you must try to tell the truth to the best of your ability.

This concept can be applied to everything that you do, no matter with whom you are interacting. There will always be people who delight in leaving negative feedback, if nothing else, just for the shock value. However, there comes a time when the truth has to come out and people must be made to understand how important it is to do the right thing. As important as all feedback is (negative and positive), having a balance between the two is essential to your professional success. If the balance doesn’t exist, your professional reputation will be affected and that will definitely be bad for business.

Purifying your online reputation

If you are in the unfortunate situation of your professional reputation having been tarnished because of negative feedback, it is important to purify your online reputation as soon as possible. You cannot afford to let it remain as is because it is potentially too destructive. There are several different approaches that you can take to purify your reputation.

• Build a strategy: It is absolutely essential that you have an online strategy for your business that is solid and effective and takes your business where you want it to go. It is important to not only have a strategy in place but also make sure that you make good use of analytics so that you have a really good sense of how your strategy is working. You should embrace all feedback and take what you can from each piece of feedback. The more you are able to do that, the more progress you will make.

• Do an online audit: It is very important for your to be aware of what is being said about your business, your offerings and your brand. The last thing that you or your business needs is to be blindsided because you haven’t been paying enough attention to what other people have been saying. You don’t actually have to reveal who you are in order to get your hands on the information. It is important for your to take the information very seriously so that you can make strides in your business and take it to the next level. It will be easy enough to figure out what people are saying about your business.

• Clean your list: Once you have finished building your strategy and your audit, it is time to revise your list. Your list may contain more than one entry for any given person, which, of course, is not necessary. It is also possible that your list contains contact information for people you no longer want on your list. They should also be eliminated. If the people on your list do not serve any purpose for you and your business, you should not have them on your list.

• Delegate: Chances are very good that you are busy with a lot of different projects. With that in mind, you probably don’t have enough time to do everything that you have to do and also to work on purifying your reputation. There is nothing wrong with delegating the work that is involved with your online reputation to other people who are perfectly capable of doing it for you. In fact, it is a very wise business decision.

• Start purifying: It is safe to say that it will be an undertaking to purify your online reputation. It will involve going over all of your data and making extensive revisions. In fact, you should not expect the purification to be finished in a very short amount of time. It could potentially take weeks. One of the main reasons why it is so time-consuming is because of the sheer volume of work that must be reviewed and revised.

• Use social media to create your online presence: Your search engine rankings are still important that they should be heeded. Google is the main search engine that you will most likely be using when it comes to that. You should use Google to push your content, which will, in turn, keep your online reputation in good standing.

• Content is the be all and end all: It is very important to keep in mind that you could receive negative feedback just as easily as positive feedback at any time. Remember, you have the power to clean up your own online reputation. You should not be fooled by people telling you that you should pay them to do it for you. It is a waste of your hard-earned money. It is also important to bear in mind that if your content is valuable, it will sell itself.

• Make your strategy work for your business: Once you have implemented all of the changes that have been discussed here, you need to make your strategy work for your business. Doing so will make you and your business more transparent than ever but it will all be for the good. You should try to be as welcoming as possible of the feedback that you are going to receive.

Conclusion

Your online reputation is critical to your professional success. It is also critical that you ensure that your reputation is solid and pure. You will find that it is quite a process to purify your reputation but that you will be extremely happy that you made the effort and took the time to do it. You will need to identify what needs fixing, use your strategy and fix it. Your professional success is just waiting for you around the corner.