Creating and maintaining a positive online reputation is a must these days, and this goes for anyone – a fresh-faced job seeker, a full-blown entrepreneur, or a seasoned business professional.  At the end of the day, who you are personally is connected to who you are professionally.  If a personal online reputation is anything but pleasant, it could negatively impact everything from potential job prospects and present employers to future partners and current clients.

The answer to this seems obvious, right?  Don’t have an online presence.  But there are more than a handful of reasons this won’t work.  For starters, it’s nearly impossible.  Could you really go without social media?

Secondly, if you don’t have an online presence, other people could create fake profiles on your behalf and assign a bad reputation to your name with absolutely no effort required on your side.  And if you have no presence, then there will be no legitimate content to compare these fake profiles to.

And lastly, modern employers and consumers want you to have an online presence.  If you don’t, they’ll just assume you’re behind the times, which isn’t something you necessarily want people to assume about you within a business context.

So clearly, there’s no way around it.  You need to ensure you have an online reputation but one that’s entirely positive and professional.  To do this, we have a few ideas for you.

Pay for it.

If this whole online reputation thing has you puzzled, there are a few companies out there who will take care of it all for you.  The two most popular ones would be BrandYourself and Reputation.com (although Reputation.com is mainly for an entire company and not the individual).  These companies will monitor your online presence and search for content that could possibly be damaging.  BrandYourself, for example, can bury pre-existing Google results that are negative and ensure that future ones don’t come up.

Enhance it.

Like mentioned previously, you can’t not have an online presence.  If you don’t have a presence, this doesn’t mean your online reputation is nonexistent.  It simply means people can make your reputation into whatever they want it to be since you aren’t there to defend it.  Do what you can to make sure you have a good online presence and an even better online reputation, and a great place to start is with your social media profiles – like LinkedIn and Facebook.  You don’t need to have a constant active presence on these profiles.  Just make sure you keep them up-to-date and that you check them regularly for any negative activity.

Google it.

Everyone says to Google your name at some point… just to see what’s there.  And when it comes to your online reputation, this isn’t such a bad idea.  You should consider googling yourself on a consistent basis.  If something does pop up, you’ll at least know it exists, and you can prepare yourself to respond to it in real life.  And remember, if you do find something negative, all is not lost.  BrandYourself can help you out with that.

Create it.

The majority of people end up with a negative online reputation because they made it that way.  They posted the inappropriate content, and they allowed things to get out of control.  Basically, they had their finger on the self-destruct button, and they pushed it.  They pushed it real hard.  If you want a positive online reputation, then you have to build it.  Be active.  Post good, PG-rated material.  And always consider potential audiences.  Would you be okay with your boss seeing this picture?  Would you be okay with a future business partner reading this content?  Would you want a client to come upon this post?  Share wisely, and build the reputation you want.