In this digital world, building and managing an online reputation has become more and more important, especially for college students looking for a job.
Here is a survey released by Microsoft in 2012, showing that 80% of HR managers use online reputation information as part of their hiring process, and 70% have rejected the job candidate due to what they have found online. These statistics clearly show that we are living in a world where visibility creates opportunities and reputation builds trust. In fact, setting up a personal blog is the easiest and fastest way of having a good online reputation.
Therefore, in this article, we have listed some useful suggestions on how to build personal reputation via blogging.
Show Your Expertise
It is fundamental to state your expertise on the personal blog when building online reputation. You need to tell your readers what you are really good at, or what you can do better than anyone else, otherwise nobody will know what is the difference you can make. For example, if you have a deep knowledge and rich experiences on search engine optimization, then you can post some professional articles about the related techniques. Once your readers have created a strong mental link between a certain niche and your personal blog, you will have a sizeable audience base and good online reputation.
Nowadays, people are floating on a huge information ocean, so you need to state your expertise to grab readers’ attention. However, this does not mean the majority of your blog page content should be filled with your expertise, for this will transform your blog into a huge selling page, and thus generate an opposite effect of your reputation.
Constantly and Regularly Update Your Blog
Writing about what you are specialized in regularly can not only tremendously refine your expertise, but also make your blog a powerful reference in your readers’ minds. For instance, if the main topic of your personal blog is e-business, and you write about it constantly for more than 2 years, then your readers will always go to your blog once they encounter some problems about online business.
However, most college students start the personal blogs with strong enthusiasm, but only keep their blogs going on for a few months. All you need to bear in mind is that if you stop posting articles for a long period of time, your readers may stop coming back to your blog site, even if they love what you whote before.
Network with Your Readers
Direct interaction with your audience is another effective way to build your personal reputation on the blog. It is impossible to control what people say about your post, but you can, at least, know whether people like you or not by checking out their feedback. Therefore, you need to keep your blog open to comments, and answer as many comments as you can with a polite manner, even if these comments only contain a few words like “nice post, I like it”.
If you find some negative feedback in your comment section, don’t get mad, just reply them politely and friendly, and try to start an interaction. Never remove these bad comments from your blog! Although doing this will make you feel better, we don’t think it will add to your reputation.
Interact With High Profile Bloggers
You can also build your online reputation by establishing a relationship with some bloggers who are expert in the same field as you are, but are more well-known than you.
The easiest way of networking with these high profile bloggers is to utilize some social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, and StumbleUpon. You can add them at first, and then chat with them. Once they give you some valuable advice during the conversation, write a post to tell your readers what you have learned from these people. The fact that you are able to communicate directly with a high profile blogger can impress your own readers to the largest extent.
Summary
Building personal reputation via blogging has become more and more popular among college students, but only a few people know how to do this successfully. With the useful suggestions we have introduced above, you can have a good online reputation with little efforts.
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