Ego Surf To Check The Health Of Your Personal Brand Online
One of the strategies I advise my clients is to ensure that they "ego surf" - in other words check what others will find when and if someone looks for them in the search engines.
I recommend that you check this each month and make sure that you check your name and your company name both with and without the "" around your name.
A great reason fo doing so is you just never know what you might find when checking the visibility of your personal brand online.
Today I checked against my name and to my suprise there was a wonderful testimonial posted by someone about the assistance I had given them about branding, blogging and social media.
Many times people may link back to you if you have a business blog and it's easy to check incoming links especially if you are blogging using Wordpress.org as the links are clearly there for you to check in the Wordpress dashboard.
In this particular case the person had linked to my profile on LinkedIn a social netowrking site used by professionals. I'd never have known that they had written such a great testimonial which has in fact led to another business opportunity if I had not checked my search results in Google.
So if you are worried that Googling yourself is vanity, get over it! You just may be suprised with the wonderful testimonials about you online. Go go one "Google Yourself" today - it may give you a great boost and is far better than a chocolate Easter Egg - and will have much longer lasting results!

I always checked my name and website to check my seo efforts. I used a program called Nemeas to give me a 15% seo increase when selecting my domain name and I like to see how I rank compared to other sites. Truthfully I thought it was a little narcissistic to always check my name but your entry brings up some valid points on checking out the branding piece of it all. Thanks
Posted by: Sarah | March 25, 2008 at 01:49 AM