One of the areas that many business owners don’t think much about is their online reputation. Everything we do online contributes to this, but there are a few other factors, as well.

What You Can Do

Staying consistent with your message is the best way to build a solid reputation. If you are jumping back and forth between topics and promoting a new product each week, then people aren’t going to necessarily start trusting you. However, if you are consistently offering quality information and advice, you will eventually gain not only trust, but a sort of guru status. This can be extremely valuable and really depends entirely on you.

What Others Might Do

You can’t control what other people are doing, but they do have an effect on your rep, as well. Let’s say a well-known blog writes a review of your site. That will most certainly affect how people feel about you and your products or services, depending on whether the blog was positive or negative in their review.

Other things that can affect your online reputation include blog comments, online reviews on review sites or anywhere that your product is for sale, such as on Amazon where customers can rate and review each purchase. Forums and social media sites can also have an impact on your business reputation.

How is Your Rep?

What are people seeing when they look for you? Every couple of months, you should be doing a check to see just what is being said about you. Do a search for your business name and another for your own name to see what comes up in Google. Your own business site should be first, of course, but what are others saying about you?

Another method of monitoring this information on an ongoing basis is to set up a Google Alert for your business name. This will send you an email with all references to the keywords (your name in this case) each day. You can see at a glance who is talking about you and what they’re saying.

When Things Are Negative

There are a few courses of action that you can take when others are trashing your reputation. The first is to respond to them. Often, bloggers or social media users will be giving a bad review because they had a bad experience. Do what you can to remedy the situation and they will likely blog and tweet that, as well, boosting you in the public eye again.

The other thing that you should be doing is making sure that you have control of the top results in Google. These can be articles on article marketing sites, blogs that you own, Squidoo pages, etc. but they should be under your control so you can make sure that people are seeing positive things about your business.

We can’t control everything that everyone says about us, but we can certainly stay on top of things and make sure that we know when someone says something about our business. It’s not difficult, with the tools available these days, so make sure you know how your online reputation is and make sure you keep it positive.