Your eReputation Development Project
By
Grow Your Professional Brand
Enhancing your eReputation is critical to establishing your credibility as a serious professional. Here’s a project plan for building your professional brand. Whether you’re currently employed or actively pursuing a job search, establishing and maintaining an effective eReputation is critical to your success.
In my last post, Your eReputation: Take the Test, I provided you with a quick way to determine the strength of your eReputation and based on critical elements related to building your online brand. If you haven’t taken the test, please do so now and save your results. The following recommendations use these test results as the foundation for developing a strategy and tactics for moving forward.
If you scored between 0 and 3, you have a low or almost non-existent ranking in Google and an invisible presence in social networks. Note: you also earn a low score if your visible but your presence is full of digital dirt. You need to embark on an energetic program to establish a positive online presence.
If you scored between 4 and 6, you have detectable presence, but it is undeveloped with incomplete profiles on social networking sites or, perhaps, you’ve neglected to exploit search engine optimization options.
If you scored between 7 and 8, you’ve been doing a great job. Congratulations! But don’t rest on your laurels. Keep at it and refresh your content on a regular basis so that you stay on top.
Building your eReputation is best approached as a project where you break down major project elements into manageable milestones and tasks. Keep in mind the fact that you can’t build a positive eReputation overnight. It takes time and effort but the results are more that worth it! Here’s an eReputation project plan outline that should help you plan and implement your own eReputation development project over six months:
Months 1 – 3:
- Search for an clean-up digital dirt
- Secure your personal domain name
- Get a personal web site
- Get a LinkedIn and Twitter account
- Claim your vanity name in social networking accounts
- Start a blog
Months 3-6
- Build out your profiles in social networks
- Automate content publishing
- Tweak SEO (search engine optimization) for visibility in Google, etc.
- Monitor your progress in Google, set up Google Alerts
Getting Started Quick Tip: Claim your personal domain name today!
Go to GoDaddy or another Internet domain registrar and get your personal domain name for less than $10 per year. For example, my personal domain name is kitjeffrey.com and the form is firstname, lastname, .com. If yours is unavailable, find a variant such as firstname, middlename, last name.
