Are You Worried about Your Online Reputation? You Should Be!

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Worry about your online Reputation

You can ruin or build your reputation with a click of your mouse or by hitting Return on your keyboard.

You have probably read about scandals where highly placed employees got fired, because they wrote some stupidities on Twitter or Facebook.

But not only prominent people have to worry about their online reputation. So do you.

It’s a scaring fact that everything you write and put online will stay there forever to testify upon what kind of person you are. Or was, one wet night in the company of your friends…

Or even worse — the information about you or your business might have been planted by your competitors. This has happened to big companies, and it happens to smaller companies all the time.

You should consider your online reputation, too, even if you’re only blogging a few minutes per week, or if your email list consists of 10 people, and you use your email client to send out mails (that’s how I started).

Why should you worry? And what to do? I’ll give you some ideas here…

People Open Your Emails Based On Your Reputation

There’s a lot of talk about using the right subjects to make people open your mails.

True, the subject means a lot, but the most important is NOT the subject of an email, but the FROM NAME.

Now, I quickly unsubscribe from fishy marketers, but I still follow a lot that I consider so-so… And then I follow some brilliant marketers. And should it happen that a so-so and a brilliant marketer send out emails with identical subjects (by chance – NOT because they were using swipe files), I would certainly choose to open the brilliant marketer’s mail and not the other one.

And likewise, I would be much more likely to open up an email from a brilliant marketer, no matter what the subject is, than to open a mail from a so-so markter with an interesting subject.

I will not go more into details with this topic, since I’ve already written a full blog post about it here two years ago: 

Do You Know What Makes People Open Your Mail? – It is NOT the Subject

People Only Buy from People They Trust

So your reputation, even if you are only an affiliate and don’t have your own products, matters.

If people don’t trust you for whatever reason they might have, they are not going to click through and buy from your links.

So be careful, when you write on forums, Twitter, Facebook and other public places. Sometimes a discussion gets heated, and it’s tempting to throw a bucket of dirt at your opponent. But resist the temptation. It’s not worth it.

An idiot will stay idiot, no matter how much you tell him that he’s an idiot and that he’s wrong. You can’t change that, so don’t even try to. 

It’s the Wild West 2:0

Remember back in the old days where men were men, and they discussed with their weapon?

Well, today only a few people do that, luckily, but it doesn’t mean that we’re safe. It’s no longer the Wild West. It’s the Wild West 2:0.

Unfortunately, I cannot boast about being the one who came up with that idea.

Two persons, Michael Fertik and David Thompson, did, and they created a web site as well as a book about this topic. On the front page of the site, you’ll mostly find short descriptions about the book, but they also write a blog, and you can learn all sorts of interesting things there.

2 thoughts on “Are You Worried about Your Online Reputation? You Should Be!”

  1. Especially in these days of phishing and emails that can unleash viruses, the sender of the email means a lot. No matter how interesting the subject matter, I don’t click on an email unless I know the person sending it.

    1. Be careful, Leo, because of lot of virus spread via your friends’s address books if they have Windows. So if you all of a sudden receive a strange attachment — even from a friend — you should always verify that he/she really sent it.

      It could be links, too. One of my friends all of a sudden sent me a mail, saying how he was always broke before and bothered his friends, and then a link to how he now managed to get rich quick. Of course, it was a scam. I guess he got a virus or something. He never told me, because he’s an avid Windows fan, and I mocked him when I received two mails like that from him.

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