So you’ve decided it’s time to tackle your online reputation. Before you jump in and decide to hire someone or go at pushing negative results down yourself, consider these four things:

Goals

What are your goals for beginning an online reputation management campaign? Are you looking to remove a post completely or will you be content once a negative result appears only on page 3 and beyond in the search engines. Are you only targeting one search engine or multiple search engines? As with any project, once you have goals defined, it’s easier to not only start a project, but to identify when a project is successful.

Timeline

Not all online reputation management projects are easy. A reputable web site that you want to move down to page 3 for a specific keyword won’t budge quickly, so expecting results in a one month time frame isn’t always realistic, while in some cases, neither is 8 months. The amount of time and effort you put into producing results will effect your timeline, but how much time and effort do you have to dedicate to just this project – 5 minutes a day or 40 hours a week?

Budget

Hiring a consultant or company to assist you in your online reputation management can get expensive – anywhere from $97 from a small company that can get you results that you have no say in to hundreds of dollars per hour for well known consultants. Even if you decide to go at it yourself or dedicate an employee’s time to fixing your online reputation, things like Pay Per Click, copywriting, web site design/building, profile creation, and press releases can quickly add up.

Maintenance

Once you’ve met your goals – say the negative results appear on page 3 and beyond – there’s maintenance time to consider. Monitoring search results and keywords, updating sites to stay relevant, adding and creating new content to continue increase links, and claiming new profiles as they become available are all part of the maintenance needed to keep the results you worked so hard for. While search engine results have the potential of staying the same for ages, a negative news article that gets republished or linked to by a major contender down the road can mean that you start all over again with your online reputation management campaign. By staying ahead of the game and building power (via links) to your positive sites, a negative result that re-appears down the road won’t take as long to push down.

{ 0 comments }