Your Personal Brand Online
August 20th, 2006
You can’t control what other people say or think about you, so online there is always potential for less than flattering information turning up in a Google search conducted by your future boss. Rather than worrying about what you can’t control you can be more proactive by publishing online yourself.
Others have given similar advice. Ian Christie was adamant that members of my MBA class all start a blog. I didn’t start a blog because of what Ian said. I didn’t maintain a homepage online for over ten years in order to build my personal online brand. However now that Muschamp.ca has been online for a few years and my blog continues to attract readers I should make better use of my Googlejuice.
Think before you post
Besides trying harder to improve the quality of what I publish online, I could do a better job in directing visitors to portions of my site that might be of interest to them. The current situation regarding “The man whose arms exploded” being my number one keyword referral is not just a result of impulsive blogging, I’ve also repeatedly linked to it. I also worked in some other dubious keywords into my writing, which can be amusing at least for a while.
You must brand yourself in today’s job market
I continue to try and improve Muschamp.ca and in addition to tweaking code, text, and metadata I created a tag for myself online “Making the Internet better since 1995.” I can’t say it has helped my career, but the search engine result pages are more consistent. I also am redoing the taxonomy of my WordPress blog again. I’ve also deleted some less than flattering content, hopefully my blog/website will eventually become an asset.
You build your reputation a day at a time
My personal brand online is still not recovered from events of the past. My continual willingness to trust people and wait for things to improve has once again not proven the correct tactic. I am not sure what to do with my career, though I am committed to passing all the CFA® exams. Alas it did not lead to a much better job, at least not in Shanghai and certainly not right away. I definitely want to be employed, but I am not doing what I want to be doing with my life.
You need to learn from the mistakes of others, you need to try and be positive and productive with your time online especially if you are unemployed. If you have any advice on personal branding especially for unemployed jobseekers you can leave it below.
This entry was originaly posted on , it was last edited on and is filed under: Advice and tagged: Blogging, Personal Branding, Self Marketing.
The link below is long by even my standards, but provides a lot of advice and confirmation that what I’ve been writing about the importance of maintaining a positive reputation is doubly important online.
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/5-ways-to-effectively-manage-your-online-reputation/
Here is an article that I’d linked to a long time ago about the importance of your personal brand. I found it while going over one of my pieces on search engine optimization.
I just keep thinking about the same old crap and wondering why it all had to happen and why it was allowed to continue and why no one could be bothered to do anything except callously watch it all unfold with a shrug.