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Market Your Business & Maintain Privacy in a Public Internet World

By
Services for Real Estate Pros with Property Target

 

Marketing gurus tell us to create a public presence online.  This makes sense, of course.  If you don't have a brick-and-mortar shop to establish your business as credible, you need to make an extra effort to convince customers and clients of your legitimacy.

This is especially true of small businesses and businesses that sell services rather than products.  If you advertise yourself as a consultant to help  people make money online and want to distinguish yourself from consultants who prey on the unemployed and desperate, you must market your expertise and professionalism as well as your services.

But, if you want to successfully market yourself for any kind of online business, it's crucial that you maintain firm lines between your business and professional personas.

Because someone like Hunter Moore may come after you.  Just because he can and he loves the attention it gives him.  He loves to stir up trouble for people on the Internet,  whether to simply cause embarrassment or to impede your ability to make money from home or anywhere else.

If you're an average businessperson or someone about to launch an entrepreneurship, you may not consider yourself under any threat from Moore, whose reputation as an Internet mad dog stems from his habit of posting nude photos of people on the Internet -- and linking those photos to a person's Facebook account and home address, according to reports in Forbes and other publications.

Chances are you've never posted any nude photos of yourself on the Internet.  And have never allowed anyone to take nude photos of you.  If so, you're safe from this particular harm to your reputation.  But if you've ever done anything embarrassing -- and most of us have -- the Internet provides nearly limitless ways to make those private moments public.

So, before you add profiles to Google+ and Facebook, post your bio and photo to your blog and type your address and phone number anywhere on the web, consider these steps to protect your reputation:

1.  Don't include your home address or phone number in any public profile on the Internet.  Even if you work and make money from home, do not share that information with the public.  It's easy to  set up a postal account with a private mailbox company and to get an extra phone number in the name of your company. 

2.  Don't include your birth name in the name of your company.  It seems to make sense to name your company after yourself -- why shouldn't you call your company "Molly Malone's Make Money Machine" if your name is Molly Malone?  Because if you -- or anyone with the name Molly Malone -- has done anything immoral, illegal or just inadvisable -- your business could be linked to the transgression.  It's the nature of keyword searches.  Type "Molly Malone" into  Google, and you'll get back 2.6 million responses.  If any Molly Malone has done something cringe-worthy, your company's reputation could suffer.

3.  Remove anything of possible detriment to your company's reputation from the Internet.  Take down anything from your personal accounts that you wouldn't want the public to know about.  And follow up with Google to get anything in their cache removed.  Just type "remove Google cache web page" into the search engine and Google will tell you how to get the old pages removed from the web.

These three simple steps can help you go about your business and make money online as intended.