9 Reputation Management Tips from a 7 Year Industry Veteran

When I first started in reputation management, it wasn't even called 'reputation management'. In the beginning we were just helping people clean up their online image and make the rankings more accurate to display who they really are or what the company was really about.

Companies can be ruined from one unpleasant review or one unhappy employee. Individuals can be held in permanent guilt for something that happened 33 years ago. For example, one of my clients had a negative newspaper article in 1980 that Google scanned as part of the Google News Archive this article was showing for his name. My client was not guilty and never went to court in 1980 so why should he be persecuted 33 years later?

Here are some tips and tricks that I've learned and used over the years.

1. Claim all possible profiles and domains

When I begin work for a client I will buy all available domains (if necessary) and 50+ social profiles. For one client we secured over 500 social profiles. Depending on the client, we will leave these blank, put up a page of spun content, buy good content, or use a snippet from an article promoting them.

2. About You or Alter Ego?

This is a question I ask all of my clients. Do you want all of the content to be related to you, or do you want us to create an alter ego? If a client has a business or can benefit from positive information about them, we always do that. The entire marketing plan is built around promoting them and helping them succeed. The secondary benefit is pushing down the negative.

3. Link Building
For most people this is the most difficult part of reputation management and it's why my white label reputation management business is so large and growing. Link building can be broken down in three ways.

  1. Untested, hope it works - This would include buying offerings in the BST section of BHW for the first time and is usually accompanied by daily ranking checks to hope you're seeing results.
  2. It used to work - When was the last time you performed a single-blind duplicate test? If you haven't tested a service in the last 3-6 months and successfully seen results, you can consider your link building method to be in category 1, hoping it works.
  3. Tested, known to work - This is what I spend a big portion of every day doing. I am constantly running tests to ensure that my link building methods are effective. Since I'm not selling a link building service, the only thing that matters are the results. Clients don't care that I've built 50,000 links if they're not seeing any results.


4. Press Releases
For an average client I will send out 5-10 press releases. I always use PRWeb's Premium package ($369 each) and PRNewswire's WebReach package ($299 each). I buy in bulk, but most people are not prepared to spend $10,000-20,000 per year on press releases. Press releases rank very well right now. This will likely change in the near future, keep that in mind before investing a lot of money in a big package.

5. Social Signals
In my testing (3 tests in 2013 and 1 test so far in 2014), social signals have no effect on ranking. Most of the people that say differently are selling a social signal service, or performed a single test and concluded their research after one test. One test is not ever proof of anything (see Rank CorrelationCorrelation vs Causation,Statistical Hypothesis Testing - Radioactive Suitcase example).

6. Big Reputation Management Companies
The large reputation management corporations, especially the ones with national advertising budgets have a clever way of continuing to milk you for money every month. On top of that, they have very talented sales people who are employed as "account managers" and their main goal is to pacify you enough to keep you sending in that monthly check. The work these companies do is basically what you could buy from KnowEm.com. I've worked with 10+ clients who came from one of the big companies and every social profile I look at has exactly 0 backlinks. These companies either doesn't know how to build links, or they choose not to build links so the work never finishes and their clients keep paying.

7. Pricing and Scams
My pricing is totally different from every other reputation management company. My pricing is based of the total extent of the work. I give my clients a single price that will incorporate everything I do. This occasionally leads to a loss on my part, but I'm happy to take a rare loss to maintain my integrity. I usually break the total fee in half, one payment up front, and one when the work is completed. This is mutually beneficial as the client doesn't have to pay the final payment until the work is completed so he knows that I'm invested in getting the work done as quickly as possible.

Big companies focus on the monthly payment. You can expect to have an upfront fee and then monthly payments until the day you die from big companies. If these companies finish the work and your negative is moved down, would you want to keep paying indefinitely?

8. Reporting
In my experience the only reporting feature that clients care about is the ranking report. SerpBook.com has an excellent feature that allows you to share the client rankings with them. All they need is the URL you give them and they see everything without needing an account or needing to pay for the service. It's a great selling point and a great feature for clients. It is not 100% accurate, but it gives you a good gauge. If you give clients all of the link building reports you create, they will get bogged down in the details and have an endless amount of questions. Just let them eat the hamburger, don't tell them how you harvested the cow.

9. Morality and Integrity
This one is a personal conviction. I don't do business with people who have committed certain types of crimes. Because of that I look at each situation individually before engaging in business with a client. It is often difficult to turn down a client who really wants to pay me, but that is a slippery slope and one I don't want to go down. This happens about once a month. When a client explains their situation and I explain that I can't help them, they often get very angry which is a good indicator that I don't want to do business with that person regardless of the reason they need my services.

Here is the big picture step by step plan that my company employs for reputation management.

1. Claim profiles, set up web 2.0's.
2. Start writers for press releases and other needed content.
3. Identify positive sites on pages 1-5. Send list to client for verification.
4. Begin link building to all social profiles and web 2.0's as a whole group.
5. Begin link building to all positive sites that are not owned by the client directly (no link building to the domains they own, too much risk of penalty with this type of link building).
6. Put all positives and negatives into SerpBook for my tracking and client visuals.
7. Day 2 - Identify any properties that have moved up in the rankings, set up individual link building to any properties ranking in the top 100 results.
8. Begin distributing press releases.
9. Link building directly to press release and 5 of the syndicated sites. It's impossible to know which one is going to rank the best so we build links to all of the good ones. We have identified 15 syndication sites that rank well in PRWeb and PRNewswire.

That's the general big picture of creating content, pushing it up in the rankings and making your clients happy. I hope this helps somehow, my goal with this guide was to give an insight into the behind the scenes working on a real reputation management company. 

I'm open to any questions or anyone who needs help with reputation management. You can post your comments here, send me a PM, email (brandonchopkins@gmail.com), phone (559-871-1613), Skype (BrandonHopkins), whatever is best for you.



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