Protect Your Online Reputation

Published in

Virtuali

8 min readFeb 19, 2023

This is a continuation of my series of “Lessons Learned from 15 Years of Freelancing.” I began this series to celebrate the 15 year anniversary of my content marketing agency, Seven Oaks Consulting.

In Lesson 6, we’re going to continue the last lesson on personal branding and further explore the idea of building and protecting your online reputation.

You Already Have an Online Reputation

If you’re online, you already have an online reputation. It’s in your best interest to manage it so that it reflects your personal brand.

Did you know that every website you’ve ever visited is recorded somewhere?

Or that tweets create their own URL?

Or that a web page you posted years ago may still be searchable?

I began my writing career 40 years ago, before the internet was even a dream. In those days, if you did or said something stupid in front of a client, or held an unpopular personal opinion, only a handful of people would know about it.

Today, say one wrong thing on social media, and the repercussions can damage your business. A sudden outburst against “that stupid politician” or controversial thoughts expressed in a quick tweet can come back to haunt you now or later.

As a freelancer, it is especially important to maintain a professional online reputation. Clients look for freelancers online, and when you apply for gigs, most clients will run a quick internet search to see if you’re legit. What do they see first? Is it an accurate reflection of who you are?

How is your online reputation?

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently. — Warren Buffet

The Importance of Reputation Management for Freelancers

Reputation management consists of the actions taken to manage the public perception of a brand or a person. If you are a freelancer, that means choosing your micro niche, identifying your personal brand, and then taking steps to promote and manage it online. Reputation management is the active management of one’s online brand.

How to Build Your Online Reputation

As a freelancer or independent contractor, your virtual presence — your digital footprint, your online reputation — is the only thing that potential customers have to assess your suitability for their project.

“But,” you say, “what about my work samples? My portfolio? My education?”

These are important, but they form only portions of the overall online reputation you have built online.

Freelancers build their online reputation from the following digital elements:

Your website
Social media, especially LinkedIn(for reviews) and Twitter
Work or gig sites, such as Fiverr, Upwork, and Guru
Review sites, such as Google Reviews
Comments left on blogs, news sites, Quota, Reddit, and other websites
Items you’ve created and published online, such as artwork shared on websites or articles written and shared on third party sites like Medium.com
Materials created for clients and published under your byline

Types of Media Contributing to Your Online Reputation

The elements listed above are often grouped into three media categories. These three categories work together to build an online reputation. There’s some overlap among them, too, but in general, online marketing falls into one of these three buckets, and that includes marketing and communications that builds an online reputation.

Owned Media

Owned media, which is media that you own or control. In the list above, your website and your social media profiles are considered owned media because you own it (your website) or directly control it (your social media presence).

Earned Media

Earned media, which is media that is owned by someone else but mentions you. Examples may include a glowing review left for you on Google Reviews or LinkedIn, mention or quotes from you in an article, an award, or similar third-party mention.

Paid Media

Paid media includes advertisements you place online or on social media sites and, to some extend, things like press releases which you may pay to release.

Media Types Work Together to Build Your Online Reputation

You must learn to manage all three media channels and ensure they are promoting your personal brand in the same manner. By this I mean that all media — owned, earned, and paid — must consistently promote the values and characteristics you wish to be known for that you identified in your work to develop a micro niche and personal brand.

Among the three, the easiest to manage is your owned media. Because you own it, you fully control it. You can say whatever you want to on your website, blog, or social media presence. So you can consistently promote your views about your micro niche in a manner that is 100% in accord with your personal brand.

Paid media can also be managed in a similar way. Publishing a press release to announce your latest venture, book, or award is a great way to control the narrative around your personal brand in a positive way.

Earned media is the trickiest, but once you identify your micro niche and take steps to manage your personal brand, earned media mentions follow in a matter of time. I have been interviewed for information for a retail marketing book and my name and tips shared in the final, published book. My article on workplace gossip, published in a magazine, was even cited on Wikipieda (don’t ask me why I found that enormously flattering, but I did). Each of these ‘earned’ mentions builds up one’s online reputation over time.

Assume Everything You Post Will Be Read by Future Clients

Many years ago, I made the mistake of thinking my personal Facebook page was just that — personal. I began to post about a hot button social and political issue that is near and dear to my heart but often polarizes people on one side or the other of the argument. My posts spilled over into less private social media sites such as Twitter, where posts can be accessed by anyone.

I will forever be grateful to a friend who messaged me privately and explained why he was deeply hurt by my posts. It opened my eyes to the fact that even though the issue was of deep, personal importance to me, it was harming both my online reputation and some of my friendships, including my friendship with him. (It also opened my eyes to another side to the issue that I hadn’t considered.)

I stopped posting about the hot button issue. That doesn’t mean I no longer care about it — I do. I continue to participate in local activities to support the change I wish to see in the world, but I no longer share my views online about it.

Is that cowardly? Hypocrtical? Some may think so, but I do not. I feel it is prudent. I do not deny my position on the hot button issue. I just choose wisely about where and how I share my opinions. My opinions haven’t changed, just how I express them.

Because I work 100% online, my online presence is all people have to judge me by. My clients never get the opportunity to sit in a room with me and hear my voice, or get to know me day in and day out. Instead, they must rely on their online interactions with me to form an opinion about my character, work ethic, and work product — in short, my online brand and reputation.

To ensure they judge me by my work, I need to focus my online presence on the work itself and the personal brand that supports my work as a writer and content marketing consultant. Hot button social issues have nothing to do with my day job. They’re a personal opinion. I have them, you have them, and we are all entitled to them. But that doesn’t mean that expressing them works in my favor or yours.

Guard carefully what you write, say and post online.

Five Steps to Manage Your Online Reputation

As you can see, reputation management is more than building an online reputation from a personal brand. It’s managing that online reputation so that it is truthful, accurate, meaningful, consistent and professional.

Here’s your reputation management action plan to ensure you’re guarding all the hard work you put into identifying your micro niche and building your personal brand.

Set up a Google alert on your name and your company name (if you have a separate company name.) Here are the instructions to set up a Google alert. This will send an email message to you every time you are mentioned online. It has been essential to help me catch little mentions of my name and byline, especially if someone quotes me online (earned media).
If your website URL is not your name, claim your name URL now and set up automatic renewal. Even if you call your company “Acme Writers” but your name is Jane Snodgrass, own both acmewriters.com and janesnodgrass.com
Claim very platform that you can associated with your name. This includes a website with your name as the URL, your social media profiles, and an Amazon author profile, if you have one. If you choose to engage on only a handful of social media websites, claim your name-based profile anyway on others; you don’t have to use it, you just want to own it so that no one else can claim it.
Set up an editorial calendar for your personal brand. An editorial calendar is a calendar of posts and topics. My own editorial calendar is written on a paper diary on my desk and includes deadlines for my company newsletter, LinkedIn articles and newsletters, blog posts, and Medium articles.
Share positive, inspiring messages aligned with your personal brand values and try not to deviate from them. If you find yourself going off on a tangent, as I did years ago posting about the hot button issues, rein yourself in and refocus.

Be Yourself. You Can’t Be Anybody Else.

Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing. — Abraham Lincoln

My last tip is simple. Be yourself. Your character guides your personal brand, and the expression of your personal brand is an extension of character. Therefore, your online reputation becomes yet another extension of your character — and thus, if you maintain your character, you will be like the tree in Lincoln’s metaphor, and the shadow you cast will remain accurate and true to who you are. This will negate any need for serious active reputation management. Your reputation instead will manage itself online.