Take Charge of Your Online Reputation - Content, Content, Content
(Page 4 of 4 )
I’ll assume you already have a domain. You want to make sure that you add useful and unique content to it regularly. Search engines love content. Keep writing useful content for your visitors and you’ll be on your way to establishing yourself and/or your company as an expert in your field of endeavor. Once you build a reputation as an expert, other blogs may start linking to you; they may even ask to interview you. That’s the kind of good publicity you can’t buy. It’s also the kind of publicity that will help get you to the top of the search engine results pages.
You can play this angle in several ways. For example, you can do research to find out which bloggers cover your field. Send them a polite email with a press release. If they use it, you can send them more. Don’t flood them with press releases; space them out over time. And make sure the news you’re sending them really is something they’d want to write about. I still remember reading a post from one blogger who wrote about receiving an “urgent” press release with “exciting” news – the company sending it had just changed their logo! The blogger’s response: big deal; send me something that would be important to me and my readers.
Another way you can play the content angle is to seek out someone to interview you about your field, your favorite hobby, or your favorite passion. After the interview, get a copy and publish it on your web site. If you were interviewed by someone in the media for a particular publication, make sure you have permission to publish it first! Worst case, you can usually link to the interview. But even someone who does a blog for love rather than money may be able to do a creditable interview and not mind at all if you post it on your site. Free publicity can work both ways in that case.
Remember that text is not the only form of content these days. Images and video also attract a fair share of visitors, especially when they’re properly optimized so that the search engines will see the important related keywords. Don’t bore your visitors. As with your text-based content, keep it useful; funny and entertaining are also important with video. Short and funny is much better than long and boring.
That’s about all I have room for this time. In my next article on online reputation management, I’ll talk about what to do if and when you do encounter negative comments about you and/or your company online.
| DISCLAIMER: The content provided in this article is not warranted or guaranteed by Developer Shed, Inc. The content provided is intended for entertainment and/or educational purposes in order to introduce to the reader key ideas, concepts, and/or product reviews. As such it is incumbent upon the reader to employ real-world tactics for security and implementation of best practices. We are not liable for any negative consequences that may result from implementing any information covered in our articles or tutorials. If this is a hardware review, it is not recommended to open and/or modify your hardware. |
/ 4 
