Using a Blog as a reputation management tool is very common. Blogs rank well on Google, they are easy to update and manage, and you can get a new blog online within 30 Minutes or less.

Most bloggers use Wordpress because of how easy it is to install and manage. Wordpress is a free blogging platform that you can install with very little experience.

WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.

WordPress started as just a blogging system, but has evolved to be used as full content management system and so much more through the thousands of plugins, widgets, and themes.

Many online reputation companies including Reputation Armor use wordpress for their clients and internally to create high ranking websites. The blog you are reading now uses wordpress.

It is very easy to get started with wordpress all you need is to Download Wordpress, a domain name (YourSiteHere.com), and a hosting services like Hostgator or whoever you choose.

To run WordPress your host just needs a couple of things:

PHP version 4.3 or greater
MySQL version 4.1.2 or greater

Once you have a domain name you will need to point it to your hosting company’s DNS (Namservers), add the domain name to your hosting account, create an FTP account (easy), create a database name in your hosting control panel, upload the wordpress files you downloaded from Wordpress.org, and change the wp-config file in a text editor and save the changes. Now you are ready to blog. It may sound like a lot to do technically, but it is VERY easy. Wordpress has instructions and you will figure it out! Just dive right in and give it a try.

No reputation management campaign is absolute without Google, or Google Profiles.

What is Google Profiles? It’s your personal profile and hub on the Google index. Whenever someone Google’s your name they will notice your profile at the bottom of the search results for your name – along with the profiles of anyone who shares your name. Why use Google Profiles? It isn’t just because it shows up on Google for your individual name.

There’s much more to Google Profiles than merely listing your name and showing your latest headshot photo. You can also incorporate the links to all the places online where you can be found. You can link to your Facebook profile, YouTube channel, and your Twitter feed, your websites and any place else online. If it’s significant and it’s about you then you can link to it. That’s what makes Google Profiles such a great reputation management tool.

If you do not use Google Profiles yet – You should sign-up and link to other pages about your personal name. It only takes a few minutes and will help! Remember Google Profiles is for your individual name, not your business name.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a great FREE tool for reputation management and monitoring. Creating a Google Alert is easy and will alert you VIA email or your Google alerts page of any new information that has been indexed by Google about you or your company (Keyword).

If you have yet to create a Google Alert for your name or business name, now is the time. It only takes a few minutes to set-up a Google Alert and once it is set-up it is fully automated.

To create your alert go here: Google Alerts

Watch a tutorial video:

Here is a service worth checking out! Most of our clients have online reputation issues and struggle to gain consumer trust due to the unfounded negative links and PR online about their business name.

To gain consumer trust you sometimes have to go that extra mile in explaining who you are, where you are, and what you do. The business verification badge by Trust Guard will help your potential clients and website visitors gain consumer confidence.

Signing up with Trust Guard will accredit your business as a verified trust-guard member and let consumers and potential clients know that you care about your businesses reputation and you are not hiding from anything (Transparent).

You will be able to display a Trust Guard online badge (also know as a seal) on your web site. This badge alone will help you increase trust and conversions.

We recently became an affiliate and unofficial brand ambassador of Trust Guard because we firmly believe that the service will help our clients.

Learn more about the service: Click Here

What exactly is online brand reputation management (BRM)?

Basically, negative or malicious press in SERPS (search engine results pages) can be battled by creating positive content and submitting it through the proper channels. If search engines deem the content it will replace the negative results which will be pushed farther down the SERPs until that post by a disgruntled blogger is on page four and your good name has been restored.

How do you combat a high-ranking negative reference to your name or company?

It is far easier to attain high rankings for a business or domain name because there is less competition for these words than for the goods or services they provide. Also, when pushing down negative rankings for an individual’s name, the name itself is important. If a Reputation Armor client’s name is Gorgonzola  Wikenstienerpalooza then it is way simpler. If on the other hand, their name is John Smith, then it becomes a task that only the best of the best reputation/brand management firms can handle.

The same blogs, forums and social networking sites which can be used to negate or slur a brand, can be used to armor it. Here are some of reputation armor’s methods

Well-written, newsworthy press releases are great Brand Reputation Management (BRM) tools for synchronized direct traffic and SERP manipulation. Even when reputation armor clients use free PR networks, they will still make a visible impact if your targeted name or company is reasonably unique.

Reputation Armor builds Squidoo lenses and HubPages for our clients. We place their name in the title and URL – as in both cases you get to pick it yourself – and it is static. This works great, regardless of whether or not your lens on “Online Reputation Management” made any revenue last year.

Building Blogger accounts is another method Reputation Armor likes to employ, again we place their name in the title and URL. You can use your mission statement or About Us page and split it into a few posts. Leave it to simmer and watch what happens.

Social Media/Networking sites with more of a professional audience – Your LinkedIns and your Facebooks as opposed to your Friendsters and MySpaces – will get indexed quickly and rise just as fast. Reputation Armor builds these kinds of profiles for our clients.

The next step is indexing – Once you’ve built profiles, a blog, a couple lenses and a hub what next? Get it all spidered (crawled by search engines) by linking to each from the sidebar of the blogger account you just created and then linking to that from your site – or another high ranking site that gets crawled regularly.

Build a custom RSS feed for the phrase you want to shield. Use Google or Yahoo! tools to watch for negative stories or press releases. Now you are on your way to proactively protecting your brand.

For more information about Brand Reputation Management contact, Reputation Armor

Reputation Armor understands the importance of Social Networking Sites. So we would like  to share  the Reputation Armor top 20 list. Rankings bases on popularity as of this month

1 | facebook.com

2 | MySpace

3 | twitter

4 | LinkedIn.com

5 | classmates.com

6 | Ning.com

7 | Bebo.com

8 | HI5.com

9 | Tagged.com

10 | myyearbook.com

11 | Multiply.com

12 | friendster.com

13 | Meetup

14 | BlackPlanet

15 | Gaia Online

16 | Piczo

17 | orkut.com

18 | FotoLog.com

19 | Skyrock.com

20 | badoo.com

To learn more about how to use social networking to manage your online reputation,

contact Reputation Armor @ 888-358-2766

Buying backlinks or text links from other websites is a widely used technique in SEO and online reputation management, but you must be careful when buying links so Google does not penalize your website or BAN your website from Google.

When you must buy text links make it look natural so Google does not know you are buying text links from other sites, Google frowns upon buying or selling text links to create artificial pagerank.

Some Tips On Buying Text Links:

• Do not buy text links from sites that clearly offer them for sale on the website you will be featured on. If they advertise links for sale on the page you are buying a link on, stay away!
• Do not buy links on sites that allow an un-natural amount of links to be on the same page as you. Too many outbound links on a page is bad news.
• Watch out for sites that have adult or casino related links on them.
• Do not buy a ton of links all at the same time; it takes time to buy text links to make it appear natural. Buy 3 high quality high pagerank links a week or a month to be safe.
• Do not buy 1000 links for $99.00 or anything that sound like a dream come true. This will only hurt you.
• Try to buy relevant links from websites that are similar to the site you are linking to.
• Use the correct anchor text. Anchor text is the word you actually link from. If your website is about Cars, do not link from sites about dogs!
• Try linkbaiting to get quality free natural links. Linkbaiting is making something so interesting that other people will link to it without you asking. .
• Do not exchange links with other sites, one-way links are the ticket. Exchanging links is only good if the site you exchange with gets tons and tons of traffic and you will benefit from actual clicks on your link.

Tips From Andy Beal As Found On His Blog:

1. Only buy links from sites that are highly relevant to your web site content. If you sell ring tones, that link from an online florist will stick out like a sore thumb!
2. If the site you are buying links from already has more than 5 paid links on the page, walk away.
3. If the site labels the links as “sponsored” or “paid links” or anything like that, walk away.
4. Be selective in your targeting. Don’t buy footer or sidebar links if you can help it.
5. Vary your anchor text. Try to make your anchor text look natural. If you buy links on 100 pages, and they all use the same text, you’re asking for trouble.
6. Avoid any paid link where the seller is also an affiliate for the broker. Those “earn money selling links”banners? Yeah Google can see those too!
7. Check that the page ranks well for its targeted keywords. If it doesn’t rank well for its own keywords, it will likely not help you.
8. Point the links at different pages within your site. Don’t buy lots of links for your homepage.
9. Try to get the links in a contextual format. A link that is part of a highly relevant paragraph will be more valuable.
10. I guess I should round this out to ten. Don’t worry about buying PageRank. A brand new page may be highly relevant to your industry and rank well, yet the PR shows 0/10. Ignore that, PR takes forever to catch up.

Source: Andy Beal’s Blog: http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2007/12/buying-paid-links.html

Buying links is a risky business but can make a huge positive impact on your SEO and Reputation Management. Is buying text links worth it? Yes! In our opinion buying text links is worth it as long as you do it the right way and don’t get caught by the eye in the web (Google)!

We offer text link consulting and campaigns, contact us for details or for help.

Here is a TON of Reputation Management tools and resources to help you with our online reputation management efforts. These are the same sites that many brands use to manage and repair their online reputations! Reputation Armor not only offers reputation management services, we like to share helpful information, tips, and tools with those who wish to repair their own reputations online.

• RapLeaf – a website that scours the Internet to find information about a given person based on their email address. Sign up for free and tell Rapleaf about any email addresses you use. Within a few hours, RapLeaf will have results to show you. No longer as impressive as it used to be, the results about me were minimal after weeks of searching.
• Naymz – a “reputation network” that lets you create a profile and then invite people to vouch for you, earning you points and improving your “Repscore”. Once you sign up, use the Naymz Reputation Monitor as another method to see what the Web knows about you. A nice touch is that Naymz lets you see who has visited your profile, which might be handy in seeing which companies are interested in you.
• Wink – claiming to “find people”, Wink pulls in results from a number of sources including Google.
• Spokeo – another people search, this one covers dozens of websites.
• pipl – like Spokeo, a people search with a fairly wide reach. Fast too. Recommended.
• Yasni – I also like this one. Yasni’s search results appear as a profile of the person searched on.
• Whoozy – nice-looking site, I like the way search results pull in information from many sources while concentrating on social media. Worth taking a look.
• zabasearch – a USA-only search, based on publicly-available information.
• PeekYou – this people search only seems to work for Americans even though the site claims otherwise. One thing I like is that it’s easy to search on someone by adding their name to the url like this: http://www.peekyou.com/Jacob_share/.
• iSearch – a USA-based people search that will also find information from USA-based websites and not just public sources.
• 123people – this people search gives you results in slick dashboard format, telling you how many came from which source.
• Whoisi – a people search over social media sites like Flickr. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work too well- it couldn’t find any of my public social profiles.
• Spock – claims to be “The world’s leading people search engine,” you can search across your Spock’s social network or across the Web. The results page is difficult to read and while Spock did find results in my case, it wasn’t better than pipl or 123people.
• Checkusernames – just what it says, this tool will check over 100 websites to see if your username is being used there. A good way to find out if someone is posing as you or just has the same name.
• myusername – this username checker verifies each site one at a time, a bit slower than Checkusernames, but it shows you which url was verified in case you’re wondering about a possible error.
• Usernamez – fast like Checkusernames, use this and the other 2 username checkers together to quickly check the maximum number of sites.
• WhoIsHim – this tool takes a name and creates a page of direct links to search for that person on social media sites.
• socialmention – a search engine across social media. Use the ‘All’ option first. Annoyingly, putting your name in quotes doesn’t seem to improve the results, making this site almost useless right now.
• radian6 – a paid solution (mostly aimed at companies) that monitors your brand on social media, has a nice interface and reports.
• Joongel’s Social Media search – Joongel lets you search many sites at once. Choose ’social media’ as your category to search digg, StumbleUpon and others simultaneously.
• samepoint – “a conversation search engine that lets you see what people are talking about.” I like the 3-column search results interface.
• RSSmeme – a tool for following the public RSS feeds generated by your social profiles at sites like StumbleUpon or del.icio.us. See what people are saying about you (by searching your name in quotes) or check what you’re sharing publicly.
• moreover – an RSS feed search engine with some filtering options. Very basic interface. There are better tools in this list doing the same task and more.
• Repcloud – a Facebook app that allows you to see what’s being said about yourself or anyone else.
• StartPR – an online reputation tracker that follows keywords and lets you manage the results with favorites, read/not read flagging and other handy features.
• pressflip – create searches and save them for updating over time. You can then ‘flip’ the results that aren’t relevant and pressflip will learn your preferences and improve future search results. For the learning to work well, you’ll need to come back often to check for new results, which is probably not worth the time.
• Swamii – a general purpose continuous search engine. Get results via email alerts.
• Trendrr – track a term or keyword across many sources, compare results (the most interesting feature) and even share them.
• Yotify – create “scouts” that search for relevant information and notify you when they find it. Has some good features like the ability to include friends in your searching but the site is clunky and slow.
• ChangeDetection – track any webpage for changes and be notified when it happens.
• WatchThatPage – another webpage watcher but one with many features like letting you decide what will be shown in alerts.
• TrackEngine – another site for tracking changes on the Internet, this one is feature-heavy but easy to use.
• Versionista – might be the king of following website changes. Versionista checks for updates hourly and will keep up to 5 versions of a page (paid users get more) while allowing you use the site to compare versions or to receive change notifications by email.
• Notifixious – a handy service that you can use to keep updated about changes anywhere on the Internet and in the way you choose: email, RSS, even Yahoo Messenger, etc.
• notify.me – “choose to have notifications delivered to Instant Messenger, SMS, Email, or Desktop Application.”
• Pingie – will send you an SMS whenever an RSS feed is updated (US-only for now).
• UpdateScanner – “A FireFox extension (add-on) to monitor web pages for updates. Useful for websites that don’t provide Atom or RSS feeds.”
• Google Alerts – a very simple service that sends you an email whenever it discovers search results for the terms or keywords you chose, such as your name.
• Yahoo Alerts – like Google Alerts, but with many more types of alert to choose from. Also, alerts can be sent to Yahoo Messenger or even via SMS (US cell phones only).
• Windows Live Alerts – Microsoft’s alerts service, similar to Yahoo’s in features but based on their own search engine.
• Technorati Search – generate an RSS feed based on what people are saying about you in blogs.
• WhosTalkin – branded as a blog search tool, WhosTalkin is actually much more. With a very simple design, you can search across blogs, major news sites, social media and many others. The site is very fast and found the results I expected to see when I searched on my name. Highly recommended.
• BlogPulse – search the blogosphere and follow the results via an RSS feed.
• Trendpedia – another blog search, what I like about this one is that you can compare up to 3 searches at once to see for example how often your name was mentioned compared to someone else’s.
• Alerts.com – another free alerts service with even more features and kinds of alerts (including job alerts). Use their RSS Feed alert to follow sites that might have negative things to say about you and your work.
• TweetScan – set up alerts based on what people are saying on Twitter. Can also search over Twitter and Identi.ca (another micro-blogging site).
• Listiti – “Get notified whenever your brand / product / company / … appears in Twitter Lists of your choice.”
• TweetRush – “aims to provide estimated stats on Twitter usage over a period of time.” Another way to learn about someone via their Twitter usage.
• Twitter Search – search for a name on Twitter and subscribe to the results via RSS feed.
• TweepSearch – searching across Twitter bios only, TweepSearch is a handy way to get inspired.
• Twingly MicroBlogsearch – Twitter Search on steroids, this tool searches across Twitter and other microblogging platforms like Jaiku and Identica while allowing you to follow the results by email or RSS.
• TweetVolume – compare the appearance in Twitter history of up to 5 keywords.
• TweetBeep – get email alerts based on results from Twitter searches.
• Twilert – same as TweetBeep.
• TweetTrak – track what’s being said about you on Twitter IN Twitter.
• EasyTweets – the paid account types allow some Twitter continuous searches plus a whole bunch of other features that you can get for free elsewhere, but not in one convenient place. For your personal needs, don’t bother with EasyTweets.
• Monitter – lets you track up to 3 terms in Twitter in parallel. Either subscribe to the results’ RSS feeds on watch the tracking live on the fly from the Monitter website. I like this one.
• TweetGrid – even better than Monitter, TweetGrid allows you to choose a grid of up to 9 (3×3) Twitter searches to track in parallel. A great dashboard for following chatter about yourself and companies you’re targeting.
• backtweets – backtweets will show you what Twitterers are saying about a url, which can be useful when that url is your website or an article you wrote.
• Splitweet – use this to manage multiple Twitter accounts from one place.
• IceRocket – a search covering blogs, MySpace and a few other sources, I like how the results are ordered by date.
• Blogscope – another blog search engine.
• Technorati – a past champion search engine of the blogosphere, Technorati still indexes millions of blogs and also lets you create an RSS feed based on a search of your name, for example.
• TinEye – an image search engine, TinEye lets you upload an image and will tell you where it can be found on the Web. Hopefully nowhere if the image is one you’d like to wish away.
• Chatter – a blog comments search engine, follow results via RSS feed.
• Chatterguard – a paid service, Chatterguard watches social media sites for you and provides alerts and reports. Might be worth the price if you’re very active online and have lots of information to track and filter through.
• Yahoo Pipes – with this free service you can create an ego feed, a customized RSS feed that pulls in search results about you from many different sources.
• MonitorThis – this tool takes a keyword and generates searches of that keyword across 19 different search engines, with the results being generated as RSS feeds in one downloadable OPML file that you can import to your RSS feed reader.
• Rich Schefren’s Reputation Monitor – does the same thing as MonitorThis but some of the search sources are different. Also, Rich has included his business-oriented blog feed in the generated results, so remove it right away but keep the rest.
• Filtrbox – funnels and filters any sources of information you choose. Pick the Free option on signup.
• Trackur – an “Online Reputation Monitoring & Buzz Tracking Tool” created by Marketing Pilgrim and reputation guru Andy Beal, Trackur was initially aimed at companies worried about what consumers and competitors might be saying about them online. Trackur is a paid service but there’s a free 14-day trial which might be enough time to discover things that other tools couldn’t find.
• Brandseye – another paid solution, this one claims to be better than Trackur.
• Attenalert – “a web service that allows you to find out who is talking about you, your brand, company or products on websites, in videos, the news and on blogs.” 7-day free trial. Like with Trackur, use the free trial to see if you can find any nuggets that the other (free) tools couldn’t.
• Distilled Online Reputation Monitor – this paid service lets you have a whole free month to test how well it can find information about you.
• ReputationDefender’s MyReputation service – a paid service (currently US$9.95/month) that generates a report of all information it can find about you online and gives you tips on how to react. Don’t be surprised if some of their tips try to get you to buy more of their paid services.
• ReputationHQ – another paid service that scours the Web for information on whatever you choose.
• BeenVerified – calling itself “Background Checks 2.0″, this is a paid service that tries to confirm your resume and your reputation for display on the Web.
• BoardTracker – a search engine that will help you see if anyone’s said anything nasty about you in discussion forums. Many features.
• Big Boards – a forum search engine that covers international sites, it either has many results or none at all.
• BoardReader – a forum search engine with a very wide reach.
• Omgili – another forum search, this one with a full-featured advanced search. There’s even a Hebrew version.
• Yuku Find – yet another discussion forums search engine, it doesn’t work very well.
• Twing – this site also lets you find out what people are saying in forums.
• Linqia – a forums and “communities” search with a nice interface and useful filters, I wasn’t very impressed when it couldn’t find my name and adding quotes had no effect on the search results.
• DataPatrol – originally intended as a way to prevent identity theft, DataPatrol’s alerts and reports can be used to find information about you online. There’s currently a free 30-day trial offered, but the site is only available to UK residents for now.
• BackType – search through comments people – you? – have made on blogs. This is useful because many sites block search engines from indexing (taking into account) reader comments. You can search by commenter’s name like a potential employer would do, or by comment text e.g. to see if anyone has written about you in blog comments.
• Keotag – a site that makes it quick and easy to search blog post tags across many different search engines. Try searching on your full name in quotes and without quotes.
• Commentful – track responses to your comments on blogs.
• coComment – yet another way to keep track of the conversations you’re having on blogs in one place. Their practical Firefox extension automatically records where you leave comments. Stay notified by responses via the Firefox extension, a Google Gadget, email alerts or RSS feeds. Plus, you can decide whether your RSS feeds should be public or private.
• uberVU – give uberVU a url or an RSS feed and it will check to see everything that’s being said about it on “blogs, Twitter, Digg, FriendFeed, Disqus, YouTube and many more. We then figure out the relationships between all those reactions, so you can see them as a threaded conversation.” Its nice user interface left a good first impression. Definitely worth trying.
• Vanno – although specific to companies, this site is worth mentioning because of nice features like user voting and user submission of stories about individual companies. Could a variation based on people be far behind?
• Blinkx – this multimedia search engine lets you find mentions in video clips and their description texts. I love the way the multimedia results let you jump to the exact moment where your keywords are said. Like any self-respecting Web2.0 tool, you can subscribe to the RSS feed of the search results too.

  Read more at: http://jobmob.co.il/blog/online-reputation-management-resources-tips