The hallmark of a credible personal brand online is the ability to create content that backs up your qualifications. How credible are you?

To answer this, we developed a Hireability Dashboard that breaks down the components of your personal brand online and grades the strength of each. Last week, I talked about our tool that grades the visibility of your personal brand. Today, we’ll talk about credibility: are your actions online backing up your qualifications?

The credibility portion of the Hireability Dashboard is broken up into tabs: your blog, other blogs mentioning you, social bookmarks mentioning you, and news mentioning you.

The first tab, Your Blog, analyzes the strength of your blog based on who’s linking to it, and your blog’s Technorati authority. The more authoritative your blog, the more your credibility score rises.

The next tab, Blog Mentioning You, tracks blog posts mentioning you. The more other bloggers talk about you, the more your credibility rises.

The next tab, Bookmarks Mentioning You, keeps track of any content you’ve created that other people Digg, Stumble, Reddit, Delicious, etc. As other people like, favorite or thumbs-up your content, your credibility score rises.

The last tab, News, keeps track of news articles that mention you. The more you show up in the news, the more your credibility score rises.

The Next Step

Now that you’ve gotten a taste of some of our tools, it’s time to find out: How credible is your personal brand online? Create a free Brand-Yourself.com account now and start managing your online reputation with our Hireability Dashboard. See you there!

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The hallmark of a visible personal brand online is the ability to be found through search engines and social/professional networks. How visible are you?

To answer this, we developed a Hireability Dashboard that breaks down the components of your personal brand online and grades the strength of each. The first section we’ll talk about today is visibility. Can you be found?

The visibility portion of the Hireability Dashboard is broken up into tabs: your Google search results, professional profiles, social networks, directories, web 2.0 services you want to protect your username on, and media related to your name.

The first tab, your Google Search Results, makes it easy to understand what someone else will see when they Google your name up to 65 Google results.

Now instead of having to Google yourself to see what’s changed within the first ten results, you can log into your Dashboard and see what’s changed up to 65 reulsts.

You can also confirm items as about you, moving them into a separate column of confirmed items.  This makes it easy to understand which Google results are actually about you. We also display the Google result rank so you know if it shows up as the first, second, fifteenth, or thirtieth result.

The next tab in the Visibility section of the Hireability Dashboard is Professional Profiles. Here, we track the professional profiles you’ve created, and suggest others you should join of to make it easier to find you online.

The next tab in the Visibility section of the Hireability Dashboard is Social Networks. Here, we track the social networking profiles you’ve created, and suggest others you should join of to make it easier to find you online.

The next tab in the Visibility section of the Hireability Dashboard is Directories. Directories are like online Yellow Pages for people. Here, we track the directory profiles you’ve created, and suggest others you should join of to make it easier to find you online.

The next tab in the Visibility section of the Hireability Dashboard is Protect These. Here, we track the web 2.0 services you’re on, and suggest others you should join of to protect your username and prevent cases of mistaken identity.

The Next Step

Now that you’ve gotten a taste of some of our tools, it’s time to discover: How visible is your personal brand online? To find out, create a free Brand-Yourself.com account now and start managing your online reputation with our Hireability Dashboard. See you there! Get started now.

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People want to interact with your personal brand on their own terms. That’s why building your brand online is so important. No matter where you are physically, getting Brand You on the web helps you attract unknown opportunities.

Today, we’ll focus on becoming visible on the web.

Before we dive in, make sure the username and name combination you use across the web is unique enough to stand a chance in Google results. To make sure they’re working for you and not against you, check out 5 Tips to Rank Highly on Google. Now let’s start making your personal brand more visible!

How to Create a Visible Personal Brand Online

1. Professional profiles. If you aren’t on LinkedIn, you’re missing out on serious professional networking. Create an account and build your brand on LinkedIn. Next, claim your Google profile, which ranks highly in Google results.
2. Social networking profiles. Be authentic and be safe here. Perception is reality on the web, so keep things clean, professional, and if necessary, enable privacy settings.
3. Directories. Create a basic profile on ZoomInfo, Naymz, Ziggs, and Xing. They make it easier to find you in Google. Think of them as a way to point people to other places like your blog/website, LinkedIn profile and Twitter profile.
4. Usernames for top-tier web services. To prevent mistaken identity, claim your username on Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Technorati, WordPress, Flickr and YouTube. Also consider an account on Vimeo, Disqus, BackType, Posterous and Tumblr. It takes a minute to sign up for each, and will save you a world of pain down the road if a belligerent ex-convict takes your username tomorrow.
5. Gravatar. Claim your Gravatar (globally recognized avatar) so your blog comments and online activity have a consistently branded headshot. Make sure your headshot fits your brand.
6. Photos and videos. Do a quick Google image search and video search to make sure you have no incriminating photos or movies out there. If you do, ask the owner to take it down or publish so much positive media that it becomes irrelevant. Visibility for the wrong reasons can be worse than no visibility.
7. Interlink your web presence. Now that you’ve laid the foundation of a visible brand with the 6 tips above, interlink your web presence to maximize your rank in Google and make it easy for people to find out more about you.

Create a Visible Web Presence at Brand-Yourself.com

Seem like a lot of work? Actually, it’s a lot of fun! We built a platform for you to establish a visible personal brand online from one central hub. Create your Brand-Yourself account today and see how our tools can help you build, optimize and promote a remarkable web presence.

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Q: What gets thousands of people fired every year and prevents people from getting jobs they want?

A: Inappropriate content online.

To make sure your web presence is helping, not hurting you, check out James DeVile’s recent article at TechRadar: Make an Online Profile to Get You Hired not Fired (how to promote your skills and hide your ills).

Here’s a great quote from the article that made us nod our heads: “The ultimate goal is to reach a stage where so much quantifiably positive information exists online that the paper CV becomes redundant.”

Right on, James. The future of hiring undeniably exists on the web. Check out the 5-part article for tips to effectively use social networks to control your personal brand online.

Author: Trace Cohen

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