When it comes to reputation management, we tend to think a lot about “spreading out.” To build your brand, you want people to talk about you. So businesses start working on their reputation by going out there.
Guest blogging, reaching out to influencers to get them review products, setting up interviews, and engaging on social media are all great ways to build a strong online reputation.
But what all of those activities create is a lot of clutter.
The more you “spread out”, the more of those efforts go wasted.
Eventually, you lose half of what you’ve built, and many of those good solid digital assets that are so beneficial to your brand image go unnoticed.
So what should you do?
Why not find a way to take all of that existing content out there about your brand, and pool it together to tell a cohesive story? This directly impacts your brand’s reputation, as every time someone’s looking for information about you online, they find high-value content.
Sounds complicated, but it really works both ways:
For reputation management, outbound tactics are not enough. To really see them work, you need to carefully organize, curate, and publicize them. This way you’ll:
- Make sure each of them will be promoted well by you and your team (to help each brand mention get more exposure)
- Avoid missing out on opportunities (for example, your previous interviews may encourage others to interview you too)
- Engage your community (customers, subscribers, etc.) to promote your brand mentions
- Help favorable brand mentions rank for various brand-related queries
- Create more sources of traffic and conversions
With that in mind, here are a few ways to consolidate your content marketing efforts for more reputation management benefits.
1. Consolidate your tutorials and videos into an online course to position yourself as an expert
One of the most unexpected outcomes of creating a video course for me was a sudden increase in emails inviting me to do interviews and other contributions. It turns out, you start being a real authority only once you write a book or publish a course.
My idea behind the course was very straightforward: I wanted to re-purpose all the major marketing guides I once wrote into something new to somehow bring them back to life and make the most of that previous effort.
So here’s what I did:
- Collected long-form content I had published on my site and elsewhere
- Determined major topics for which I had at least 6-7 solid guides touching on different angles
- Based on that (plus using keyword research tools), identified the structure of my course
- Found “gaps,” i.e. chapters I didn’t have written content for
- Wrote content to cover the gaps (to use on my blog or for my guest blogging columns)
- Turned article content into voice-over
- Used on-page screenshots (and other screenshots, screencasts, and graphs) and the voice-over to turn my articles into a well-structured guide. I used a simple tool for this called iMovie but there are lots of options.
This tactic can be applied to your video content too (if you have an active Youtube channel). Look at your playlists of brand-owned videos and think if there’s an opportunity for a course. If you’ve done video guides and how-to videos, chances are there’s a good re-purposing opportunity there.
When creating a video course to build up your brand, keep in mind:
- You want to own your content (so it’s best to host it on your own domain)
- You need to brand it well. Your students need to be regularly reminded of your brand.
- Use your own logo, color palette, and mascots. Don’t forget the downloads you’re giving away with the course too!
Uscreen.tv is a great platform that will offer you all the customization and branding features you may need. With it you have full control over your course:
- Use your own domain
- Manage your pricing model (or give away the course for free)
- Send and schedule emails to your students
- Create nice landing pages to convert more visitors into students and more.
- Offer your students the option to access your tutorials from a mobile device through a custom app
It even lets you create a standalone mobile app to give your students an alternative way to access your premium content. This way your brand can also be discovered through app search engines, increasing the number of channels through which you can be discovered.
Positioning your brand as a significant thought leader works wonders for its reputation. And a structured course is the perfect way to do just that!
2. Consolidate your (team) guest articles into a single feed
The work of your expert writers reflects positively on your overall brand image. You want your customers to know that your business is represented on high-authority sites. This promotes your own site as the knowledge hub and builds its trust.
So why not publicize your guest posts on other sites on your own blog?
The easiest way to do this is to automate it via the RSS feed. For that you need to create a combined RSS feed that would include all your (and your team’s) author RSS feeds.
To find your individual author RSS feed on almost any WordPress-run site, go to your author page that usually looks like this:
site.com/author/username
Now just add /feed/ at the end:
site.com/author/username/feed/
Collect all your author RSS feeds from all the websites you or your team write for. Now install this WordPress plugin and put all your author RSS feeds there:
For free, the plugin will retrieve the 10 latest articles from your author RSS feeds from all of your columns. You can see the example here.
So what to do with that combined feed?
2.1 Showcase your collective expertise on your blog
Use one of the following methods to publicize your combined author RSS feed on your company site (to help them get noticed by your customers and give them authority boost for higher rankings):
- Any WordPress installation comes with a built-in WordPress RSS widget. It will display recent items from your RSS feed wherever you install the script.
- FEEDZY RSS Feeds Lite aggregates RSS feeds into your site with shortcodes & widgets.
- There many more plugins that allow different ways to syndicate an RSS feed on your blog. So play around!
2.2 Make it part of your brand ambassadorship program
I always integrate these feeds into my team ambassadorship dashboard within Cyfe. (Disclaimer: Cyfe is a client, but I have been using it for ages).
I add my (remote) team members to a separate dashboard to keep them updated about brand mentions and brand assets, and encourage them to engage with those:
2.3 Generate even more social media shares to your brand content
Use ViralContentBee’sRSS feature to generate even more shares to guides and articles your team publishes online. Any time there’s a new article in your RSS feed, VCB will add it to its dashboard for social media users to share it on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and StumbleUpon.
Full disclaimer: I am co-founder of Viral Content Bee but I am also a regular user.
Don’t let these high-value guest posts go to waste. The more you can make prospects aware of them, the more you prove that your brand is an industry leader.
3. Consolidate your interviews and featured mentions by creating a solid About Us page
Do you know what happens when you link to a page that mentions you?
You help it rank better in search results for various brand-focused queries.
The more pages that rank for your brand name (and various queries that include it) you can control, the safer you are – as you won’t let any negative mention (if for whatever reason one happens) easily outrank your page and hurt your online reputation.
The perfect scenario is to rank your own assets for all types of search queries containing your name:
There’s a free tool called Ubersuggest that you can use to find those queries that contain your name:
[Tip: If your brand isn’t large enough, try searching for your better known competitors to understand what your customers may be interested in when researching your business. Sort your keyword lists by search intent to better plan your content strategy.]
This is where all kinds of pages that mention you (interviews, reviews, video tutorials, launch announcements, etc.) come into play: Use all of these assets to control more of the search results that come up for your name.
Your About page is a wonderful place to link to all kinds of pages promoting you: This way you consolidate your featured mentions in one place and help them rank better too.
It’s also a good idea to monitor rankings for all kinds of outside brand assets to see which ones work best for you. I use Topvisor for that because it’s the only position monitoring solution that allows to monitor all important search engines including Youtube:
Besides, creating a well-researched, smartly-structured About page for your business has a lot more benefits you may have failed to consider:
- Build authority by showing where your brand is mentioned
- Build empathy and increase your conversions by showing real people talking about your brand in a positive way
- Encourage more media coverage by sharing your press contacts and showing which media outlets already covered what you have to offer (and thus attract more links and mentions)
And of course, all of this serves to strengthen your reputation online, especially with prospective buyers, but also future employees.
4. Consolidate your brand mentions within one dashboard
Each brand mention is a call to action. You want to make sure that your team is there immediately to thank, explain, or prevent a crisis. It’s been found time and again that an unhappy customer can be turned into a brand ambassador if they promptly hear from a brand on social media.
Now, to afford that kind of urgency, you need to have all your team involved, especially if your customer service team is not too large. For one of my own brands, I even went beyond that and involved a group of brand ambassadors in the process to ensure there’s always someone there to engage with customers on social media.
Mention is a perfect platform for this because you can create your monitoring dashboard andadd multiple users.
Before involving more people in the process, don’t forget to introduce clear guidelines on how to handle different types of mentions properly.
Reputation management is hard but it’s also necessary. So it pays to think about the positives.
All the above tips will help you create a stronger brand and quite possibly discover new ways to attract traffic, leads, and even find new ways to monetize your online presence.
Please let me know your thoughts in the comments!
