Manage Your Online Reputation
A few weeks ago I read an article about a new online service that aims to help you manage your online reputation. I must admit that I was intrigued at the idea of such a service. It’s very clear that this is a growing need for many of us with online presences (good and bad that is).
The Service
BrandYourself.com is the service. They do a great job of taking Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and making it surprising simple to make “SEO positive” changes and track the results. Basically you are given a “search score” where you tell their site what Google searches for your name are positive or negative. Then you submit links for their service to track. After submitting links BrandYouself.com gives you several options to “boost” your links. Boosts are simple changes to the links you submitted that make your personal brand/name more SEO friendly.
My Results
Last month I made several changes the site suggested and the results over one month (April-May) were pretty cool. This blog rose 17 positions in a Google Search for “John Cason” & my LinkedIn Profile rose 2 spots in the same Google Search. A one month jump was pretty cool evidence that their service does work.
The changes I made were called “boosts.” Basically they give a percentage point system to every link you submit to BrandYourself.com that track how much you have increased its crawability by Google. It’s kinda like social gaming for your personal brand/name.
Weaknesses
I imagine these will get ironed out over time, but I can’t complete some “boosts.” For example the service tells to change my LinkedIn short url from www.linkedin.com/in/jrcason to http://www.linkedin.com/in/johncason. However someone else has already reserved the “johncason” short url. The site does not recognize that that name is already taken and it will not measure your “boost attempt” unless you do exactly what they recommend. In this case I could never complete that “boost.”
The site offers some basic tips surrounding SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in targeting your name/personal brand. One possible downside is that much of their service depends on Google crawling BrandYouself’s users profiles. Google could easily exclude this site from their crawling…This is what Google did to some “content farming” sites a while back. However I highly doubt Google would do it unless the service gets out of hand (ex: such as marketers using it to manipulate Google’s search results.)
What are you waiting for?
With that said, I highly recommend BrandYourself.com. It’s a very cool idea.
Check out my BrandYourself.com Profile to get an idea of what a profile looks like - http://johncason.brandyourself.com/
Find the Lowest Gas Prices While Traveling this Holiday Season
Last week I found a cool website called FuelMyRoute.com. It is a pretty barebones tool right now, but the idea seems great. When traveling you need a location to buy gas. Ideally, it would be good to know where along your travel route gas prices are the lowest.
FuelMyRoute.com was started in 2008 while Marcus Christie was planning a trip to Disney world. There were several great tools to find local gas prices, but not much to help in finding prices along a specific route.
This could be a great tool to try out when traveling this holiday season. Below is a screenshot of the results I got for the trip my wife and I are taking later this week. I was surprised to not have many options other prices along the route, but this could be dependent on the sources that FuelMyRoute.com uses. I imagine this will improve as the site grows.
So if you need a tool to help find lower gas prices this season while traveling, hop over to FuelMyRoute.com and give their service a whirl.
Friday’s Trick – Send Faxes, Sign Documents & Fill Out Forms using hellofax
A few months ago, I tried out doing a little series called “Friday’s Trick.” I decided to stop it when I relocated to work with Chick-fil-A at Perimeter Pointe. After looking at the traffic/visitor data of my blog, it was clear my most visited posts were either a “Friday’s Trick” or a more personal blog post about my life. The data doesn’t lie, so I am going to start the series back up again.
Today’s trick is a very simple tool used to send and receive faxes using only your computer. This is perfect for anyone that deals with contracts, nondisclosure agreements or any document along those lines.
I like Hellofax because it saves time. In a normal situation, you would need to print a contract, sign it or fill it out and then fax it back (hoping the fax number is right and that it goes through). Hellofax allows your to do all of this on your computer – edit the document, sign it using an uploaded signiture, and send/recieve faxes. Imagine never having to leave your desk to complete the paperwork.
If this is something that would help you or your organization, check it out at http://www.hellofax.com.
