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/
Friday’s Trick – Auto Search Craigslist with Notify.me & Yotify.com
Every Friday I share a web tool that has help me or that I find interesting. Last week I discussed how to create your own screencast using Screenr.com.
Often I find that I am searching Craigslist for something I need. I go to Craigslist and search for it everyday. I kept saying to myself, “I wish I could set-up an automatic search to save time.”
Well, I found several services that can accomplish that and much more.
Notify.me
Notify.me delivers notifications that interest you in near real time. It eliminates the need for you to constantly check on classified listings, blogs or social networking sites.
Notifications are pushed to your destinations of choice such as instant messenger, mobile phone, email, desktop or web application.
Click here for detailed instructions on setting-up detailed instructions on custom Craigslist searches.
The uses are beyond Craigslist – they have documented how-to’s for Facebook, Google News, Yahoo! Real Estate, Songza and more.
An alternative to Notify.me is Yotify.
Yotify.com
Yotify is a similar service that send “scouts” to crawl the web. You can search Craigslist, Youtube, ESPN, the Wall Street Journal, etc.
Yotify will easily allow you to track anything on the web that matters to you.
So, if you are ever experiencing the same problem as me and need an easier way to search craigslist, both options should be of pretty good value to you.
How Online Marketing Drives Offline Success
I ran across this cool info graphic today in my Google Reader. It come from KISSmetrics, an awesome web analytic company.
It provides some insight, analytics and case studies into why small, local services should use social media to increase sales…. Very good info.
Here is the graphic from the KISSmetric blog post:
