Cliff Krahenbill – October 10, 2023 – 10-minute read
Reputation is everything; what the Internet says about you is your online reputation. Most employers will do a quick pre-online screening of your name to see your online reputation. But, unfortunately, all those selfies of you hitting the bong and posting anti-social comments can and will haunt you. Anything and everything you post on the Internet becomes a chronicled history of you, good or bad; it is there forever. Luckily, someone denied an opportunity because of an inadequate online screening and came up with a solution for the rest of us.
Brandyourself.com offers a free and a pay-for-service you can use to repair and then monitor your online reputation.
Go to www.brandyourself.com, open a free account, and fix your online reputation. Do what it tells you and follow up with any alerts. I’ve had my free account for at least three years, and this service took my Internet reputation from good to excellent.
Every employee background check is conducted using the information posted by them and about them on the Internet and from searching online public records. A criminal background and credit check usually go back seven years. Most states regulate employee background screening for 7 or 10 years. Therefore, you need to use this knowledge to your advantage.
As a minimum, you should be showing up on the first three pages of a Google search with nothing but positive things about yourself, and from there, you need to get the first ten pages to sing your praises. After that, push any negative information back in the search results.
You need an active blog, Facebook, Twitter, and a LinkedIn account, and you need to be posting updates to all your social media accounts every two weeks using your first and last name so Google can find you.
If you’ve been watching the news, you know that anything and everything you post on the Internet, even if it’s private, can come back to haunt you. My advice is to keep your opinions to yourself, and if you don’t have something positive to say, don’t post anything. Likewise, keep your religion, political views, and sexual orientation to yourself.
If you have the money, hire ghostwriters to write blog articles and ebooks and send out press releases about you. For instance, you earned a new cert, had a job promotion, or conferred a degree. That’s newsworthy and very positive! You can find these people on Fiverr, and they will write a blog article or send out a press release for as little as $5.00.
Let me leave you with this one small piece of information: there are no dogs on the Internet. You can be 7 feet tall, with a six-pack of abs and a full head of hair if that is what you want. How you build your reputation is totally up to you.
Keep thinking positively and working on getting to that next station in life. Don’t let your online reputation get in the way! How you get it is subjective. It can be first-class accommodations on the Orient Express or an overnight layover in a run-down Greyhound bus depot in Fargo, North Dakota. Reputation is everything, and once you lose it, it is very difficult to get back, so make sure you take care of the one you have.