As a blogger, your readership is everything to you. Your readers become something of a family and support you in ways innumerable–by sharing your work with others and helping build your readership, by providing valuable feedback in helping you improve, and by generally making you feel as though you have something of value to put forth into the world.
So what if your online reputation becomes tarnished in some way? Do you risk losing your readership? Absolutely–we’ll explain why, and how to prevent this from happening.
Your readers will search for more work by you. If your readers are interested in learning more about you or in reading more of your work, they will conduct an internet search using your name. If they find negative articles about you, this could be a huge turnoff. Perhaps they had one impression of you that you worked hard to craft with your blog–that can all turn on a dime with one negative search result.
Your readers won’t want to refer you if it reflects poorly upon them. Just as your reader might be turned off by finding negative search results about you, so might your reader’s friend whom they have referred to your work. If the friend conducts an online search and finds negative results, that might simply reflect poorly on the referring friend’s taste, which no one wants.
Prevent the angst of losing your readership–stay on top of your online reputation!
A reader may start to comment less. Your readers’ comments can appear in their own search engine results, especially if their first and last names are associated with their usernames. If they decide they do not want to be associated with you given your negative online reputation, they may start to comment less frequently and engage less, impacting the sense of community on your blog.
A frustrated reader might take it to your blog. If any of your readers feel misled after finding out information about you in search results, they might take it back to your blog and comment there, which would then expose you to more of your readers. The last thing you want is one disgruntled reader impacting everyone else’s perspective on you before you have the opportunity to clean up your online reputation.
You don’t have to be an angel to have a good online reputation–it simply takes some management.
So, how can you do just that? It turns out there’s quite a bit you can do to manage your online reputation.
There are services that exist solely to help people monitor and manage their online reputations. You can start managing your own by working to push negative links past the first page of search results, which most people don’t look beyond when they conduct an internet search. Building up your social media presence simply by creating profiles on social media sites that tend to be highly search engine optimized will help you to do this. Search Engine People provides a list of over 50 sites you can use in this process.
In short, managing your online reputation is a process well worth undertaking to ensure that your readership continues to see you in a positive light and does not stray.
About the Author: Cara Aley is a freelance writer who covers a wide variety of topics from online reputation management for Reputation.com to digital marketing strategy.
