Your Reputation Matters

By Alice Coaxum

The way to gain a good reputation, is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear. ~ Socrates

 What does really reputation mean?

Your reputation is your overall character or qualities as seen by others, how a characteristic of yours is recognized by people or even how you are judged by others. Your reputation can be outstanding or terrible depending on whose opinion, of you, it is.

Your reputation can help propel you to success or hinder you so you should treat it like it’s fragile because it can take a long time to build a well known good reputation and crumple and break easily in a very short period of time if you let it.

While of course, you won’t please everyone all of the time and you shouldn’t try to because you have take charge of your own life and business and run both the way you see fit, but even still you should be endeavoring to maintain a good reputation.

There will always be naysayers, doubters and those with a general distrust for any and everything. You can’t please that type of person but you can and should guard your reputation with all of your might.

People who don’t know you, that you’ve only seen online can only go by what you show them.  They won’t know all the good deeds you do in your offline life. Your online reputation is directly connected to your online identity.

Many times people won’t want to purchase from you or get involved with any type of business with you if they don’t know your reputation or if they think it is shady. It’s very easy for someone to check your online footprints. There are websites dedicated to taking complaints and spreading the word about unscrupulous people and that’s not where you want your name to wind up.

You want to treat your reputation like a bank full of money or precious jewels in a museum, like something that would  be heavily guarded and not left without protection of any sorts.

How can you guard your reputation?

• Be a person of your word. If you say that you will do something or give something or sell something a certain way, then you need to do it. Nothing can ruin your reputation faster than a lie.

• Some make their living swindling others, getting fast money while they can, not caring about tomorrow or the day after that because once people are on to them, they will just switch names and businesses and start all over again. They do not care about the reputation and lack integrity. It’s this lack of a caring attitude for your fellow man, that gives internet marketing a bad name.

• Be fair. If you wouldn’t want to be handled or treated a certain way, make sure don’ t do it to others. There are real people behind: the profiles you see on various social networking sites and the email address who subscribe to you.  Don’t be labeled the jerk, swindler, scammer, greedy marketer who only cares about money or any other unpleasant term you can think of. Show people that you care.

• Leave gossip to the gossipers. Don’t get caught up in the he say, she say of the newest drama circulating on the net. If it doesn’t concern you, don’t get involved. This way your good name isn’t associated with whatever is going on.

Remember:

When people hear or see your name you want them to think of you as an upstanding person, one of the good guys who they can trust when you recommend or teach.  You can’t be anyone’s go to person if no one trusts. Think long hard about the association you keep and the joint ventures that you make because people also judge you by those you surround yourself with.

Example: If one good online marketer frequently kept company with and formed a business alliance with three known bad marketers, all people would see is four bad marketers.

It’s so easy to ruin your reputation and hard for people to forget whatever you did that ruined it. Everything that you do should be always be in alignment with how you want the majority others to think of you. I say majority because the simple fact remains that there will always be haters and doubter around. You can’t change that, but you can do your best to carry and live up to a  good reputation.