If you are doing any kind of business then it’s obvious that many will be there to praise you and double the number will be to criticize you. This makes reputation management not an easy task for any business owner. With the power of internet it is easier for an unhappy customer or your competitors to harm your business. Now only a single complaints board site or a strong Yelp profile is enough for influencing the decision making of thousands of prospective customers.



If you are already a victim of online reputation abuse then you know very well how bad it can be. To fight against it cost you lot of time money and effort. But lots of businesses out there are lucky to be still untouched by this problem, but you never know when the “bee” will sting you. So don’t let that happen to you – “be proactive”!

Let’s explore the ways on which you can start working today and build up your strong positive online reputation.

1. Ask your happy Customers To Rate You and Give Good Reviews

   A successful business has a long list of happy customers. Ask these customers to write good reviews on your business profiles like Google Places, Yellow Pages, Manta etc. More the reviews more will be the little star rating that shows up with your site in search engine results. These shining yellow starts will act as indicators of your good work quality and your brand name.
   
   Never try to manipulate for these positive reviews just ask your customers to review you in reward of good service you have provided them.

2. Keep a Check on Your Social Media Profiles

   The best place for anyone to target your online reputation is social media sites. One bad tweet about your business can roll out to thousands followers, that tweet can be converted to a bad mouthing post about your business or company. That blog posts can rank number. 1 on Google with your brand name searched.
   
   How bad repercussions your business can face if you are not aware of what is being written about you on these social media sites.
   
   So start monitoring today. There are many paid and free tools available which gives you daily stats of all your social media profiles. List of such free tools are:
   
   • Google Alerts
   • Trackur Free
   • Hootsuite
   • Social Mention
   • Backtype
   
   Tracking can be done with the help of keywords or phrases which could include your name, your company or brand name or your product names. But remember don’t just monitor, act also. If you find that someone has a problem or has an issue in dealing with your business. Look into the matter and solve it. Don’t only look for problem, if someone praises you or your business, thank them.
   
   

3. Build A Link Wheel of All The Positive Content

   Gather every positive word written about you online. For e.g a positive write up has been written about your business in a local newspaper and it is available on their e-paper. Smart pro-active move will be to start linking to that online article link.  So when anyone searches for your brand name the results come will be your company site and the online positive content about it.
   
   Google your Brand name, find what all in showing up in later pages like page 2, 3 and 4. Promote the positive and valuable URLs coming on the page. Link building for these URLs will push them to come up ion search results.
   
   Build links for all your positive content, brand name, products like social media profiles, business profiles it will help in protecting your online reputation. Build such a strong link wheel of your positive links and content that it will become difficult for anyone to intrude it.
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   Online Reputation Management as a business is growing at an astounding rate. Many companies out there are providing you service to build your online reputation. Or bring back the lost ones. Many help you fight against that rip of report which comes up on Google page 1 on your Brand Name. 
   
   As they say, “Prevention is better than cure”, and it aptly fits in the area of reputation management. It can take years to a company to build a strong positive reputation, but it take few bad reviews and complaints (false ones also) to break that reputation. So it is worth spending some time in adapting a pro-active approach and save our online reputation.

Author Bio: Catherine Jones writes for ip pbx phone system providers. She is a freelance blogger and likes to write about various topics like social media, latest technology trends.