Online reputation is important to set yourself as an industry expert, rise higher in search engines, and become popular among people.

But no way does that mean you copy others, or lose your own sense of identity or voice to please other people. Some strategy will fascinate people, while others won’t. It’s just the way in every field – you’ll not always hit the bull’s eye and don’t feel bad about it.

Give your best shot and leave everything for your readers. See what excites people and use that key information to improve online user experience.

Here are few simple guides to establish your reputation online:

Know Your Audience

The first step towards building a strong online reputation is to figure out the people whom you’ll write for, whom you’ll offer your services and products, because after all, they’re the ones who will help provide a feedback whether you’re doing it right or going wrong.

So, before you even publish anything on your site, do an in-depth research on your target audience, their wants and needs, and think of ways how you can provide them exactly that.

Knowing your audience means looking at their buying behaviors, where they’re located, and what they are talking about.

Develop a Voice

Establishing a formidable online reputation requires you develop a unique voice and maintain it. Your readers and potential customers visit your site to read information you have published there and they want to learn more about you.

So, how would you like to present yourself to them? Friendly? Entertaining? Interesting? Insightful? Developing your own voice is crucial to establish a strong online reputation.

Dare to be Different

There are already million of blogs competing with each other for the same niche, or same set of topics, and following them is just like becoming one of them. Not only it will rob your freedom to share your unique skills and experience you bring on the table, but you’ll soon start to see yourself settling for mediocrity.

On the other hand, when you tend to be different from other people, you’ll naturally be yourself and original. This way, you’ll separate yourself from the crowd. People want different and honest opinions on things. Stand up and raise your voice and be heard! Be unique because no one can be like you.

Write Quality Content

Quality content means lot of things to different people. Quality content is well-written, solves a particular problem, and encourages people to do certain things. Make sure to include keywords at appropriate places to make it search engine friendly and make it easy to read. Proof read at least once before you publish.

Become an Industry Expert

If you want to establish a formidable reputation online, you’ll have to become expert at your niche, or aim to be one. Well, you cannot hope to get a industry expert by posting few blogs around general topics, or what others are usually writing about. You’ll have to cover each and every topic (it’s not a rule of thumb, but just a suggestion) so that you know about everything.

Publish helpful content, comment on queries, offer solutions, and engage your clients with fresh and unique content, once a while.

 

 
Besides a good brand name, there are other important things you need to consider to manage your online reputation. In this article, we’ll discuss 5 free tools to help manage other aspects of your online reputation

Why is online reputation so important for small business owners? Well, a strong reputation will help you attract new customers, keep those who are already these, and expand and grow your business.

While managing a business reputation in the “traditional” sense meant developing public relationship across different geographic regions, today online reputation has created another layer in the marketing process to make it easy for people to keep track what people are saying about them and take appropriate actions to deal with them as soon as possible.

If you do not have a way to know what people are talking about your brand on blogs and social profiles, then you should as most savvy small business owners do.

Here are 5 free tools to manage your online reputation:

Google Alerts

Here’s an extremely easy and convenient way to keep track of your brand mention on the Internet:

1.     Visit google.com/alerts and fill up your company profile, and set up options how you’d like the results to be delivered.

2.     Next, narrow down your search query by including certain types of media, such as news, videos, or blogs.

3.     And then, have your results sent to you directly in your email or through feed reader. This way, you’ll get immediately receive an alert if someone mentions your brand on the Internet. How convenient!

TweetBeep

If Google Alert is king on Google, TweetBeep is the Queen on Twitter. You can try TweetBeep absolutely free and get hourly updates of your brand mentions through Twitter posts.

TweetBeep looks for tweets that links back to your blog or site.

There’s also a premium version of TweetBeep for only $20/month that offer comprehensive alerts (almost 200 alerts!), and comes without any ads.

Social Mention

If you’re a popular brand, you probably get plenty of mentions online, including in social media sites.

Social Mention is social media search tool gathers content generated by users such as blogs, posts, status, tweets, pins, and shows you who is searching for you online and what they’re saying about you on the Internet.

It keeps track of more than 80 different social media properties, including Facebook, Google+, and Twitter.

IFTTT

If you’re using Internet to market your business, you probably have come across the term IFTTT, pronounced as “ift” as in “gift.” This online reputation tracking tool helps you with many things, automatically.

For example, you can connect different web apps like Facebook, Weather, Dropbox, and Evernote through the use of conditional statement known as “Recipes.”

You can either create or use recipes other people are using to get alerts. These recipes will help you get notifications, content backups, deals, and many other things.

Hyper Alerts

Hyper Alerts is another easy to use tool that will send an alert whenever something is mentioned about you and your business on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media accounts. You can customize the alert settings to send you notifications within minutes, or after every hour, day, or even weeks and months. What a smart way to manage your online reputation.

Tell us about you: which free tools do you use to manage your online reputation? How have they benefited your business? Please comment below. Thanks. 

 
What are the top 5 most sought after niches that you can build a site around and generate huge passive income?

Every day a new profitable niche pops up, but we’ve compiled a list of top 5 most sought after niches that will be beneficial for first-timers a well as industry veterans.

Here are our top 5 most sought after niches:

Payday Loans - Payday loans is a small loans market, which is growing in Australia, Canada, and the UK, not mentioning in the United States too. In 2008, Payday loan market was estimated to be worth between $800m and $1bn a year, but most experts think the true market value of this niche was much higher than this.

As the payday loan market is becoming more well-defined, many financial organizations as well as regulatory authorities are showing much closer interest.

Niche Insurance – Insurance market is important because every individuals and businesses needs protection against financial losses. Although insurance for life, travel, home, and automobile are easily obtainable, other types of insurance cover is very difficult to get.

For example event insurance, unusual professions and drivers with convictions niche needs special insurer who have in-depth understanding of these particular risks and who can offer policies that can be customized to fit the need.

Finance – It is very easy to enter into a finance niche, but making a long term career out of it requires a lot of patience, intelligence, and a thick-skinned psyche in order to succeed. There are plenty of positions in the financial niche, and if you can spend the next few years on learning all the tips, techniques, and smart methods of the principles of the financial world, you will find a profitable position that will be a good fit for you.

Real Estate – Finding profitable real estate opportunities out there and settling into a niche that you will enjoy writing about can be a lucrative strategy. Either you can become an expert on many phases of real estate, or you can narrow down your expertise in a niche market (sub-set of a broad market) and become an authority figure. We’ve seen a lot of real estate agents as well as brokers who have entered a very specific real estate niche to focus their energy to a particular geographical area, or sub-group of a consumer, or a type of property, and make a decent living.

Web Hosting – There are plenty of interesting niche in web hosting niche, such as cloud hosting, green hosting, Linux hosting, etc. And there is only handful of popular web hosting companies out there, such as Godaddy, BlueHost, HostGator who offer high quality web hosting services at a very affordable price.

It may be difficult at first to gain a large market share when the competition is so high in terms of price and services, nonetheless, you can focus on their weaknesses and capitalize on that limitation to make high ROI.

For example, although I preferred to host my site on HostGator, I found their web hosting package somewhat limiting as I could not subscribe on a monthly basis. After a quick search on WarriorForum, I found a reliable web hosting service that offered me UNLIMITED space, bandwidth, and domains at an affordable price and on a monthly basis. Superb!

Conclusion – Top 5 Most Sought After Niches

If you were thinking of starting a career in a popular niche and make a passive income so that you could retire early, consider one of the above top 5 most sought after niches before creating a website.

 
What are the ways to dominate your industry online to come across as an industry expert, rise higher in search engine rankings, drive massive amount of organic (free) traffic to your site, and increase online conversion?

You see, everybody wants their website to generate from the Internet, however, only few of them become successful, while most other simply become overwhelmed and quit before they even begin to market their company, online.

So how do you exactly dominate your industry online and increase online revenues?

In this article, we’ll show you 8 hot tips to dominate your industry online. Don’t worry as everything is explained in a simple step-by-step technique that even a 12 yr old school boy who knows how to use Facebook can follow it. There are plenty of small business owners who are using these strategies to dominate their industry online, and so should you..

8 Hot tips to dominate your industry online:

With these eight tips, you’ll rise higher in search engines, get plenty of traffic to your site, and finally, increase sales through your site. Awesome? Well, if you think so, let’s continue to reveal you each hot and trendy tips to dominate your niche, starting today!

Keyword Research

This is the first internet marketing step you’ll have to perform in order to learn more about your target audience. You’ll “spy” on other competitor’s website and use Google Keyword Planner tool to find what your prospective customers are typing to find companies like you on the Internet.

In addition, you’ll also find out the lifestyle, demographics, and buying behavior of your customers to form better communication strategies.

Online Branding

Branding helps you stand out from the crowd by highlighting your unique vision, mission, and ideas that makes you so special. By focusing on the specific unique qualities of you, you’ll be able to offer something different to the masses out there.

Brand is the reflection of your image, and it will help you bring out what you want to communicate to your target audience and how they want to remember you.

Web Design

In order to dominate your industry online, you’ll need to have a web design that is professionally designed, visually attractive to make people want to stay and learn more about you, and hopefully, convert into a long term customers.

Your web design is another essential part of the Internet Marketing strategy to come across as someone who’s responsible, serious (means business), and authority figure in their industry. On the other hand, suspicious websites do not rise higher in search engines rankings to get huge ROI.

By developing content and graphics that is consistent to your branding, you’ll be able to make people feel comfortable to transact with you, make them listen to you, and then, form a long term relationships with each.

Get a help of a professional graphic designer to build a website.

SEO

Once your web site is designed, the next important thing you must do is optimize it for the search engines. Optimizing your web design for search engines will help you rank for proper and profitable keywords, easily and quickly. But most small business owners make a mistake of targeting their website with high competitive keywords that most giant companies spend millions of dollars to rank in the 1st page of Google.

SEO involves both on-page and off-page SEO. So, before you publish anything, your website needs to be optimized for search engines, submitted to Google, and focused around a key term, which all are on-page SEO.  

Off-page SEO means generating free backlinks from authority sites to allow people to visit your site if they’re interested what you have to say.

Blogs

With right types of Internet Marketing strategies, blogs can help you dominate your industry online. If blogs are optimized around keyword phrase people type to search your business, they’ll have more chances of displaying in the search results, and hence, drive traffic to your site.

Once your people are on the site, the next thing you’ll have to consider is to get their attention. Blog are long form of content, unlike short form of content like Tweets and Facebook status updates that are effective ways to influence your business by bringing awareness and engagement with your audience.

After you’ve designed a site, set up a blog.

 
Email Marketing

Whether you’re marketing someone else’s products, as an affiliate, or your own products and services, you’ll have to build your list. Email marketing involves formatting your emails in a way that generates maximum impacts in terms of clicks and conversion rate. If done properly, it can send plenty of free traffic to your site, turn your prospective clients into a long term money-paying customers very quickly.

Social Media Marketing

Do you know that 1billion people use Facebook to communicate with their friends, families, and search for information they’re interested in, including products and services that you have to offer? If you know how to start promoting your business using major social media network, step by step, then you can easily target people who are eager to buy who are desperately looking for your products and services.

Video Marketing

If you want to send massive amount of targeted audience with “zero” cost, you’ll have to create a short video to market your business. Creating video isn’t difficult. With screen capture software like Camstasia (free trial) and MS PowerPoint, you can create high quality videos in a matter of minutes. You’ll also have to optimize your video while posting them on video marketing sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Screencast, and so on.

 
What makes one digital marketing campaign work than other?

Internet is one vast blank canvas where savvy PR people can exploit the media and cut through the noise to get their consumers listen to them.

We asked some of the most successful young entrepreneurs to share their favorite digital marketing campaigns so far and why they work.

Here are top 7 killer digital marketing campaigns 1. Nike’s Ad featuring Christiano Ronaldo

Recently, Nike created a new ad campaign with Christiano Ronaldo. The visuals were not only captivating, but the slow motion capture on Nike shoes went viral too. This ad campaign is a classic example of how deeply a company understands its products and consumers and use creative marketing strategies to grab their attention to rake in the profits.

2. Awareness Campaigns for the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef

Tourism Queensland, a travel and tour company, had to come up with a marketing campaign to bring awareness to the island. They were both limited with budget and time.

The solution - they devised a print and online media ad campaign with the title “The Best Job in the World,” inviting people to work in a tropical heaven, with heavy paychecks and no rent.

3. Old Spice Complete Re-branding – “I’m on a horse.”

Old Spice Brand did a complete re-branding of their product with the phrase “I’m on a horse,” which not only creating a social media buzz on Twitter, but also compelled people to create more buzz by making the company’s videos go viral.

4. Mercedes-Benz’s Sprinter Road Trip

Mercedes-Benzes customers were complaining that the Sprinter would not work proper during the winters. So, Mercedes decided to take a bunch of Sprinters on a 9-day road trip from Canada to Alaska (in temperatures below -40 degrees) just to prove their customers wrong.

This is a classic example of how much company is willing to stand by their brand.

5. Barrack Obama Campaign during the Election

While many people consider Obama’s run to the election be a controversial topic, but we cannot overlook his social media approach to drive more people to cast vote for him.

Obama’s campaign “Yes We Can,” campaign picked up a new marketing trend to discuss his run to the election by consistently interacting with his voters via his website, social media, and viral videos.

6. NY Fashion Week’s 360-degree Fashion Experience

This year, an emerging trend is setting into the world advertising – i.e. the meshing of online and offline businesses. In February 2013, the New York Fashion Week invited brands from both online and offline worlds to interact and immerse their clients to offer a complete new fashion experience.

7. Hunch.com Campaign with Infographics

Most Internet users have short attention span, but if you’re reading this far, you are not among them. Great! However, Infographics is a great way to present the most important parts of the content in an entertaining and eye-grabbing manner.

Hunch.com used Infographics on their website to help their consumers find out more about their likes, dislikes, and interests on wide range of topics. 

 
SEOed website ranks higher in search engine result pages (SERPs), which increases website traffic, and help small businesses make more online revenues with least amount of hassle and worries.

Recent studies have proved that users are manipulated by the search engine results. That means if your website isn’t ranking higher in SERPs, chances are very few people will visit your website.

However, with good SEO, your website will get user traffic and ultimately online revenue. Here are out top 5 SEO facts and stats that could be useful for small business entrepreneurs (SMEs):

Top 5 SEO Facts and Statistics

Online visitors find you through SERPs

Do you know that most people use search engine results to find you? The do not click on sponsored ads? Yes, it’s been found that more than 70% of users find you through search result pages. The interesting part is that 70% of people prefer using web to find out about new products and services. Not to mention almost 50% of online visitors use search engines to purchase products online and 60% of users visit websites displayed on the 1st page of search engines.

So, if you’re not in the 1st page of search engine result pages, you won’t make money online.

Good SEOed website ranks better in search engines

Your potential customers think website ranking on the 1st page search engines is most relevant and credible. So if your pages with main keywords of your niche are in 1st page of Google, more people will find you through organic search result pages.

In other hand, bad SEOed website won’t rank higher in search engines. Likewise, site that does NOT use proper SEO techniques will also never rank higher in search result pages.

Most users click on the natural search result pages

If your site (web page) is ranking in the first few pages of search engines, expect to get more traffic from there than you would get from paid advertisements that is burning a hole in your pocket.

Over 79% of users said that they usually/frequently click through the search engine results. That means they click on organic search results to visit your website. Almost 80% of people say they rarely or never click through the sponsored ads displayed on search engine result pages.

The moral of the story - if you spend the next few months optimizing your website and content you’ll drive more traffic through organic searches than paid advertisements and save plenty of money.

Inbound lead is “cost-effective” than outbound lead

In a recent study, search engine marketers found that “inbound leads” cost 61% lower than “outbound” leads. Inbound lead comes from proper SEO techniques, while outbound lead comes through cold calling for example. As a result, the closing rate through SEO is better, over 14%, than outbound leads (such as print ads or direct mailing), which has only 1.7% closing rate.

Search engine results is the #1 traffic drivers to a website

According to a study conducted by Outbrain, search engine organic clicks were the number 1 traffic booster to a website, leaving behind social media sites by over 300%.

Most organic clicks, almost 18%, went to the #1 position, while 10% of visitor clicked on the #2 position, and the remaining 7% of people clicked on the 3rd position.

 
If you’re not ranking higher for your niche-related keywords in the Google, or your rankings never improves even after 3 months of SEO campaign, you probably must be ignoring these top 5 Google trust factors.

5 Google Trust Factors that You Cannot Ignore

Related article: Top 10 Contributing Google Ranking Factors

Post High Quality Content Regularly

Google’s main aim is to serve “content-rich” websites to its users. Posting well-written, industry-related, and interesting content is one of the simple yet effective ways to establish “trust” with Google.

In addition, fresh and useful content makes people want to come back to your website for more. If the content solves their pressing problems, and if it genuinely works for them, people will do all sorts of thing for you.

For example, they’ll not only “like” or “comment” on it, but also act as a virtual marketer for you by sharing your content with their connections (friends, families, colleagues, boss, etc).

Do us a favor – cover all important topics on your industry and post them on the “blog” sections. But do NOT copy a phrase from other websites. In addition, make each articles at least 500 words (for best results, post 800 word article/post).

Make your content highly relevant to human as well as search engines. Learn the basics of on-page SEO to optimize your content, but if you don’t know or don’t have time for it, hire a professional SEO consultant to handle your SEO.

Related article: Blog Your Way to the Top

Spread Your Content

Building a strong online presence is the key to establishing a strong “trust” with Google. But spreading duplicate/same content will also get you nowhere.

Google trust sites that have links coming from various sources – social sites, article directories, forums, blogs, and other high PR websites, etc.

So, make sure to spread “unique” and “niche-related” content. The best part is that you will only need to do this once.

Related article: 100 Compiled High PR Sites for Your Back Links

Establish Yourself as an Industry-Expert

Google is constantly looking for well-established websites or industry experts to serve better content for their users. So, if you set yourself as an industry-expert in your niche, you’ll earn “trust” from Google.

In order to establish trust with Google, set up a blog on your website and start publishing niche- or industry-related posts. Reply to comments; participate in niche-related forums, blogs, and article directories by posting useful content on topics that interests people.

Related article: 8 Ways to Manage Your Online Reputation

Make Yourself Known to Google

Google wants to display websites that appear “normal,” “natural,” and “transparent,” in their SEO and other marketing methods. In short, they want “genuine” website.

So, to make sure you’re helping Google, include the following information on your websites, even if it’s a blog and not a company website.

1.    Add a real picture of you and your business

2.    Include real testimonials from customers (on the sidebar)

3.    Include social widgets – Facebook, Google+, and Twitter buttons and share plugins

4.    Create an "about us" page and include a brief history about you and your business which may include business aims, vision, and missions, team members, and business methodology.

5.    If possible, include business accreditation and certificates on the footer/sidebar of your site

6.    Include contact information prominently on your website. Include the name of the business, slogan (tagline), address (using Google Map), email address, Skype ID, Phone/cell number, hours of operation etc.

Related article: Reputation Management for Small Business Owners

Do NOT Get Entangled with ‘"Black Hat" SEO

Google love sites that are active online – i.e. sites having plenty of inbound links (links from other websites) and outbound links to authority websites.

But in the past few years, before the Panda and Penguin updates, there were many websites that utilized “black hat” SEO (illegal) methods to influence high search engine rankings, thereby, overshadowing other “genuine” sites.

Google received plenty of complaints from its users that they’re constantly landing on low quality websites. This raised a “red” flag among Google SEO experts. As a result, to prevent low quality websites from displaying in the top 10 positions of search engines, Google released Panda and Penguin updates.

Once again, people started to visit high quality article.

So, in order to build a “long-lasting” relationships with Google, you’ll have to make sure you’re only following “proper” SEO methods and tactics, and not try to game the system, which will only land your site in their “black-list,” that can not only drop your rankings from the search results itself, but also totally ban your sites from displaying in the result, again.

So, do us a favor. Do not buy “cheap SEO” services from any company, instead get a help of a professional SEO consultant, don't “keyword stuff” hoping to rank higher in search engines, always follow Google guidelines, and most importantly, stay up to date with the latest trends, techniques, and tips on SEO, and Internet Marketing in general.

Signup for Google alerts!

Related article: Top 10 Digital Marketing Blunders

Tell us what factors we need to keep in mind to build trust with Google? Let us discuss it in the comments section below!

 
Most people today know a lot about building a strong online presence – they know how to setup websites, social media profiles, get customer feedback, and so on.

But merely building a strong “online presence” isn’t sufficient enough to guarantee success online. The tough part lies in defining your company’s brand to get as much people to know about you, your products and services.

Online branding is probably one of the best online marketing strategies that will help you establish as an industry expert.

So, simply setting up a website with static pages and filling up quick information on bunch of social media profiles will create a strong “online presence,” but not a brand!

Branding deals with more than simply making it easy for your visitors to find you on the Internet. Branding is all about creating a strong image of your business to make you stand out from the crowd.

Here are 5 pointers to consider when branding your business online:

1. Identify your “idea” or “target” audience.

2. Think about services your “target” audience may require once they land on your website.

3. Think about how you will improve their quality of life, or solve their pressing problems, or add value into their life?

4. On which aspect of your product and services will they likely offer their feedback on? You need to anticipate on which topics people may write positive/negative reviews about your product so you can tackle those issues efficiently when they arise later.

5. Now ask yourself, “Am I, or my company staff, available for customer support on our social media profiles?”

All of these questions will help know identify your business brand. In addition, you may also need someone to look after it, address people’s concerns on social profiles, before you setup your website and fill up social profiles.

If you find that your staffs are fully packed, you may need to contact a professional company and outsource your online brand management campaign to them.

So now that you know what your brand is and the person responsible to manage your online brand, its time you think about your website. Your website must be the focal point for both content as well as design.

The design element of your website, social profiles, and other High PR websites needs to be consistent. That means if your Facebook fan page is about “Smith’s Plugin Company,” it cannot be “Jane’s Plugin,” on LinkedIn. This will only confuse your customers.

In addition, your business logo and other design elements have to be same. In other words, everything has to represent a single brand.

Once all the design elements are taken care of, put all your energy to craft out helpful, informative, and niche-related content. The content that is on your business site and social profiles will help you drive to the front page of search engine results, and help you establish a strong impression among your prospective customers.

Have any comments, queries, and questions about branding your business online? Do not hesitate to share your comments below or feel at ease to contact us today.

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So you have set up your e-commerce online store with product pictures, specifications, features, and pricings, but you haven’t seen the number of people visiting on it go up?

It’s time that you look deep and analyze why you aren’t reaching out to the “right” kind of people.

Most of the time, people are usually leave their product page that contains specifications, pricings, features in bullet points, and technical jargon product description that doesn’t help both search engines and your visitors know what you’re selling.

Othertimes, the content simply aren’t specific enough to target buyers in the market because you may not be using proper keywords phrase that people often use to search for products like yours.

Here are 5 handy tips to reach out to the “right” audience for your e-commerce website:

1. Write “Content-Rich” Product Descriptions - Writing “content-rich” product descriptions means including as much information about a product or services in an easy to read manner.

Before writing product description, it’s better to think about all the possible keyword terms your “targeted” audience use to search for it. Once you have the list of keywords, you next job is to create a thorough description that includes those keywords.

Make sure to include those keywords in a natural way. “Unnatural” keyword stuffing will only lead to Google punishing your site.

Make sure to use easy to read, jargon-free, and informative content that includes your major keywords.

2. Create “Relevant” Blog Posts related to Your Products – Once you’ve creating “content-rich” product reviews, do not be tempted to leave it just like it or promote using social media sites or article submission articles.

Remember Google loves information rich resources that help their users find what they’re looking for? “But what’s wrong with the “content-rich” product descriptions we created earlier?” I hear you scream!

I can understand but unless your website is a well-established site like Amazon, you cannot get high rankings for your product descriptions. In other words, you cannot just rank for product descriptions.

In Google’s eye, you have to establish yourself as someone who’s passionate about their niche: someone who likes to share ideas tips, and more free information to people who are searching for.

So go ahead and just do that. Create a blog section and publish posts that are relevant to products on your online stores. If you’re running out of ideas, you could share the benefits, pros, cons, or write honest reviews, and so on.

Include links to your product pages to allow people to navigate to your store when they’re ready to buy products from you.

3. Spread your content on relevant sites – Now that you have a great product description and blog posts, your online store is ready for traditional marketing techniques.

You can be creative here and use your imagination to share your content in number of ways, including writing guest post for others, submitting useful tips on content sharing sites like Dropbox, or submitting them on articles directories and your social profiles.

Personally, I share my content on social profiles like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. Make sure to join “highly relevant” groups there to reach out to the “right” target audience, really fast.

4. Include backlinks to your blogs posts – During publishing your blogs or product description pages on external sites as mentioned above, make sure to include a backlink in the signature, or author box.

Include keywords or title of the landing page on the “name” field, the actual landing page on the URL field, and offer a thoughtful comment on the blog or forums you’re dropping your content.

This way, your articles, comments, or threads are more likely to be accepted.

5. Do not forget to use Social Profiles – In order to rank higher in search engine results, your website has to be well-established and active on third-party websites, your social profiles, and other external websites.

Do not settle if you’ve managed to reach the “right” audience after performing the above four steps.

You can still go one step further to “truly” establish yourself as an industry expert. Once you’ve managed to create a strong online presence, you do NOT have to invest anymore. People on your networks will help promote your business automatically.

So do us a favor – post a brief product information and blog content on your social media profiles. In addition, bookmark your content on popular social bookmarking sites.

When Google finds that your backlinks are coming from variety of sources, not just from search engine results, automatically they’ll love your online store and increase your rankings.

We would like to hear from you. Tell us any handy tips to reach out to the right audience for your e-commerce website (comment below).

 
Online reputation management (ORM) is the “lifeline” of your business!

Although we may NOT care what other people think of all the small things, but overall, we still want to be “respected,” “liked,” and “thought well of,” in a deeper level, don’t we?

So, here are 8 creative ways to manage your online reputation to shine your business, attract new clients, and build trust and engage your customers, starting today!

1. Start a Blog

People who generally post blog on their field are perceived as those interested and passionate about what they’re doing. This will eventually help them attract more visitors as they’re more likely to listen to someone interested in what they’re doing over someone who’s just in for a quick buck.

So make sure to post helpful, informative, and interesting blog topics that reflect you’re your personal vision, mission, interests, and passion in life.

In addition, share your wisdom and engage people by commenting on other blogs.

Related article: Blog your way to the top

2. Establish Yourself as an Industry Expert

If you’re an industry expert, more people is going to trust you and your offers. Similarly, search engines such as Google will also display your site over other “spammy” websites when you have a strong online reputation.

So begin sharing your ideas through blogging, or comment on posts that you are knowledgeable about to show that you care especially if you want to be associated with others too. Having a mutual and long conversation will affect your website positively on search engine results, thereby placing your site higher among other search results that are idle and static.

3. Keep Your Website Updated and Polished

A clean, professional-looking and well-maintained website is crucial in today’s competitive age, regardless of the size and type of your business. No, we are NOT asking you to spend hundreds of dollars to make it fancy or big, but it has to be updated and accurate.

4. Express Your Technical Know How

A business that still utilizes outdated technology is generally perceived as outdated. In this information and technology driven society, being “Internet savvy” and “techy” is vital to your online success and coming across as capable and competent business.

So do us a favor – update your mobile devices, computers, email, printers, software, website and media pages.

5. Be an Effective Communicator

Keep your messages, letters, and voicemails brief and to the point. Make sure to include your contact information even if your recipient has it. Check for spelling and grammars. Ensure you include your business information – your full name, business name, location, toll free number, phone, website URL, hours of operation – on prominent locations on your website.

6. Be Calm and Positive Whenever Possible

Reputation management is not just about limiting your online damage, but also taking proper steps to improve your business, brand, and even how you work. Every successful entrepreneur make mistakes, but they quickly place new set of actions to prevent it from occurring again.

Say sorry, think ways to improve your services, let your people know how your services are going to improve, and send an email to your clients telling them that you’ve taken time to listen to their requests/complaints.

Suddenly, all those complaints and problems will turn into a selling point.

7.  Develop Reliability and Responsiveness (R&R)

It’s important to develop your online reputation for reliability and responsiveness by setting strict rules for communication.

For example, if there are any complaints, resolve them quickly. If you delayed your service or made a blunder, don’t try to cover it. Instead, own it and take proper steps to fix it, quickly. If need be, send an “apology” letter.

A complaining client will become your greatest asset when complaints are solved effectively and quickly. In addition, your online reputation benefits too.

8. Respect Privacy

Protect sensitive information such as credit cards by utilizing secure URLs. In addition, create a privacy policy page on your website ensuring them that you won’t use their email address and name other than sending out information to them. Likewise, you may also want to have a discussion on sensitive issues (financial transaction, for example) on a separate place.

Go on! Tell us how you manage your online reputation. Please, comment below!