Maintaining and repairing your online reputation! Everyone has one!

Reputation is everything and what the Internet says about you is your online reputation. Most employers will do a quick pre-online screening of your name to see what kind of an online reputation you have. All those selfies of you hitting the bong and posting anti-social comments can and will come back to 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 who was denied an opportunity because of a bad online screening 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 and open up a free account and get your online reputation fixed. 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 information posted by them and about them on the internet and from searching online public records. A criminal background and credit check usually goes back 7 years. Most states regulate employee background screening to 7 or 10 years. 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 work on getting the first ten pages to sing your praises. Push any negative information as far back in the search results as you can. 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, keep your opinions to yourself and if you don't have something positive to say, don't post anything. Keep your religion, your political views and your sexual orientation to yourself. If you have the money, hire ghostwriters to write blog articles, ebooks and send out press releases about you. For instance, you earned a new cert, had a job promotion or a degree conferred upon you. 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 positive and working on getting to that next station in life. Don't let your online reputation get in the way! How you get there is subjective. It can be first class accommodations on the Orient Express or an overnight layover at 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. Talk with you later! Regards - Prof. K