Your reputation is one of the most valuable things that you own, and just like it is difficult to get rid of that embarrassing childhood nickname that your older sibling, or classmates called you, it is difficult to fix a bad online reputation that you may have, although it is possible.
Today there are many companies popping up that promise to fix/manage your online reputation for a “Low, Low monthly rate!”, but as with everything else, I would urge you to take these ads with a grain of salt. Depending on what exactly is “wrong” with your online reputation, how well you want/need the reputation scrubbed and a few other factors will determine whether this is a job you can do yourself or if it is a job that requires professionals (NetLZ offers an online reputation fixing service).
The first thing to realize about your online reputation is that the “bad stuff” will never really go away, all you can do is make the things you want people to see about you to be more visible and the bad things will become less visible – just like that annoying childhood nickname might one day pry its head if you run into a classmate that you’ve not seen in years and who is unaware that your current acquaintances do not know that you were once, in a former life, called “stinky”, you might occasionally encounter a person who, in doing a more detailed search on your name will discover your past, but with time, and with the right effort, your past will remain in the past.
The first step to fixing your online reputation is to Google yourself and look through the first few pages of the results, if nothing comes up on the first two pages that you do not want seen you are pretty safe as far as an online reputation is concerned (people rarely browse past first 2 pages of results), if, on the other hand, the first, second, or third result is an article written about you that you do not want read, there is work to do… The first step is to join, and become active in a bunch of the top social networking sites, Facebook, Linked In, Twitter etc… (and make sure that ALL of the content that you post here is stuff that you want other people to see!!!) You should try to get as many friends as you can in these networks, start discussions, join groups, create groups, debate with your friends… (basically be an active member of each site). Doing this will help move that negative article about you a few slots down in Google results and will hopefully bump it off the first page of results, if not try step two, (below) and if that still doesn’t work I recommend you contact us and we will fix your reputation.
The second step in fixing your online reputation is to start a blog, blog often, and blog consistently. This step is more complicated b/c you need to make sure that your blog has proper SEO so that it will be well indexed… but even a blog with “bad SEO” will help you a little as far as managing your reputation.
Besides the above steps there are many other things that can be done to manage your reputation, perhaps I will discuss more such things in the future…
(If you know any other tricks that I have overlooked in this post please feel free to mention them in the comments section of this post)