Building an online brand for yourself or your business is a necessity in this digital age.

You are probably being “Googled” on a daily basis by prospective employers, business associates, clients, stakeholders and decision-makers.

Stay with us this week as we conduct you through the intricate steps of creating a sterling online reputation for yourself/your organisation.

Step 1 (Accessing Your Current Situation)
- Start with an assessment of your current online standing by searching your name, company name, brand or other key phrase on Google and other search engines.

- Focus primarily on the first three pages in Google’s results.

- Input this information into a spreadsheet, listing the name of site, urls, the tilt of your online mention (if positive, negative, or neutral), comments from other people on the mention, etc

Step 2: Identify the Changes that are needed

- Look through each of the results on the spreadsheet and identify items that need to be changed.

- If there is anything negative, it will be marked as priority to either delete or push down farther in the search results.

- For results that contain key information that need to be promoted, mark as items that need to be move up in the search rankings.

Step 3: Identify Channels of Influence

- Colonise the pages of search engines by subscribing to social/professional networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google plus, YouTube etc.

- Create profile on https://about.me/

- Develop your own website/blog

- Post regularly on your website/blog until they rank top 10

- Identify the sites where your target audience are, so as to be seen and heard in the places that are most important for the type of reputation you desire.


Step 4: Building Process

- Start creating content for your platforms and promoting them to enhance your chance of popping up in search engines.

- Engage an expert to help battle ‘stubborn’ negative search results appearing on 1st and 2nd page of search engines, if you have any. (TRW CONSULT can help)

- Keep message consistent across all platforms.

- Keep tracking progress by searching for results continually.

CREDIT: Digital Solutions Dept., The Ready Writers Consult (TRW CONSULT)