How to Protect Your Reputation with a Blog http://ift.tt/1Ad8Hf2 @BloggingTipsCom #Blogging

If you’ve ever worried about your online reputation and what people might find online surrounding your personal name or business, starting a blog is one of the best ways to combat these issues.

Here’s a clear cut plan to get started and have something live within the next hour.

Register a domain name related to your name or business

Setup hosting and install wordpress

Create five to seven quality posts for your site right away

Link to all of your social networking profiles

Share, promote and like these articles across all social platforms

Seem easy enough? It should, because the beginning phases of protecting your identity and reputation online are just that simple.

However, the method above simply isn’t enough to protect your name for the long run or even outrank anyone who might already rank for your business or personal name,.

Instead you will need to start monitoring your mentions online, seeing who is ranking for your name and what you can do about it.

I’ve mentioned other tools in the past like Google Alerts for setting up email notifications to see what is currently (and new) ranking in the search results for your desired terms, but there are others that you should consider as well.

InternetReputation.com for example has a free service where they send you updates with anything new that gets triggered based off your desired search terms. You can see an example of one of their emails below.

Internet Reputation Alerts

That darn golfer “Zach Johnson” is always causing a mess around my name in the search results

No matter whether you are looking for a new job or just wondering what appears in the results for your name, it’s always a good idea to have some form of tracking in place.

What to Look for in Terms of Negative Rankings

When looking at the search results, the most important thing for you to consider is what links are good and which are bad.

In the screenshot above you will see that the “Meet Zac Johnson of ZacJohnson.com | Ranktactics.com” link is considered “Possible Positive” — which it is.

In the “Search Engine View of Your Results” you will see a few other articles. As mentioned, “Zach Johnson”, the golfer, got triggered for my name a few times so none of these are of use to me… but they aren’t negative at the same time. If they were, they would be marked with that red x.

Zac Johnson vs Zach Johnson

To improve your search results, you would want to increase backlinks to the good articles… in hopes of pushing down the negative ones.

How a Blog Helps Your Online Reputation

As mentioned in the beginning of the post, one of the best ways to combat the chances of a bad search listing is by creating a blog focused around your business or personal name. If you have a business name that is already well known and want to protect your personal name, throwing up a resume site under yourname.com, would be a great option. Once the resume site was created, you could then link to it from all of the major social networks and job sites out there. The link juice from these sites would then push your site higher in the rankings while pushing your competition down.

Blogs are great for protecting your online reputation because they rank well with Google, they are easy to setup and you can continually build up your content and brand power in the process. If you haven’t secured your personal or business name as a domain name, I highly recommend you do that immediately!