With the new focus on a future of full-time blogging, I’ve been working hard on the look of ViperChill and on the look of another blog that I will be officially launching sometime next week.

I’ve designed three websites from scratch in the last week and a half so while everything is still fresh on my mind I wanted to take a look at the types of things I include and my reasons for doing so. Hopefully, if you agree with any of them you may be able to tweak your current design to include them or keep a note of this post for a future re-design.

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So, recently our feed count crossed the 500 mark and made it to 511. Whilst I don’t want to be “blowing my own trumpet” I am going to take a look at the main principles that helped us reach this target and some of the things that hindered it.

To be honest, 500 feed subscribers aren’t that much compared to some of our fellow bloggers but it is a milestone and one that I am personally proud of. It has taken 2 years to get to this point, i only believe I really started blogging in the last 10 months; we had only 40 feed subscribers when we first added the Feedburner chicklet.

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We’ve had a lot of success with a particular client recently and I wanted to share that with you guys today. They wern’t exactly getting ‘nothing’ from blogs or top sites but it wasn’t anything to talk about. However, in pretty much one month of brand building and recommendations we changed all that.

In April we sent them well over 550,000 visitors from the likes of Digg, Fark, StumbleUpon and Reddit. While I can’t give the exact details, I am going to look into the steps they took based around the advice we gave them and how you can start to look at having similar success.

Need proof?

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If you have read this blog for any length of time you will know I’m a bit of a stats geek and love researching things in quite a bit of detail. This post is no different; I decided to check if there was any correlation between the amount of mentions on 3 big social media sites compared to where a site is placed on the Technorati Top 20.

Of course, all these blogs are big and well read, but does their social presence hold any indication as to why they are so popular? Let’s find out shall we:

Technorati Top 20

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If you don’t think you are “big enough” to be protecting your personal brand online then you are thinking along the wrong tracks. What happens if you suddenly write that killer blog post, release that awesome software or get mentioned by another big name and people start trying to utilise you.

For a serious and very accurate example, take a look at Seth Godin. Darren Rowse noticed that the Twitter account for Seth (which has over 3,000 followers) had absolutely nothing to do with him. I should note that this profile was recently updated to state it was unofficial - but what if the author of this account started insulting others or acting very unprofessional, it could easily start to tarnish the brand of the well known author.

4 Simple Steps to Protecting Your Personal Brand

1. Own Profiles on the Top Social Sites

As the Seth Godin example implies, even if you aren’t going to use sites like Twitter (our profile), it might be best to have an account there with your name just incase.

This can even apply for many more sites such as:

• Facebook
• MySpace
• LinkedIn
• Any other community type sites in your niche

Generally, there are ways you can deal with people fraudulently acting as you, but it can be so much easier to just create a profile on these sites in the first place…protection and branding.

2. Buy Your Domain Name

I always complain when people don’t practice what they preach, and if im honest I only registered glenallsopp.com in the last 4 months, theres going to be something on there very soon. The point I’m trying to make is that although you may have not needed to use the domain for anything now, the $8 you can pay, or the multiples of that if you want the .net, .org or any more extensions is good reassurance that you have ways to protect your name if needed.

The best bet of course would be to put something on those now, Glen Allsopp.com may just become a landing page that links to my profiles around the web but at least its not being utilised by someone who has had a bad experience of me or just wants to try and damage my reputation online.

3. Monitor Your Name

The best way to monitor yourself would be by covering the services we mention in the feeds we monitor for clients post, and if you are completely new to this, check out the step by step guide on exactly how to do that.

Basically, the best places to track include:

• Search engine results for your name
• Industry sites related to what you are about
• Blog search engines such as Google Blogsearch
• Forum search engines such as Boardtracker

4. Think Before you Act

Just like you take the time to think about what you are going to say to someone, hopefully in a sense that won’t offend them - you should do the same online - don’t think of the internet being any different. It can be easy to come home drunk and submit an entry on twitter or be enraged by another blogger and retaliate on your own blog.

The people who understand how important their online reputation is will take the time to assess a situation before they take the next step; which is usually when they have calmed down and can think rationally.

In Summary

ViperChill was gratefully linked too from a well known american news source, katu recently. The only way I found out about it was through checking Google Analytics referrers, for all I know this news source could have been saying something bad about the company that could have been very damaging.

Thankfully, it was a link to one of our recent articles:

Monitoring your personal reputation is very important, as is knowing how to protect it. Hopefully, the information provided here is enough to get you started on the right path.

When I completely changed the theme of this blog to match the passions I have and the services I want to be offering, I started looking for more and more ways people can find themselves online, especially where others can’t.

For example, a great way to find if you are getting talked about on Facebook (which you won’t find using Google Blogsearch, Google Alerts or any other tool) is to check your Analytics stats to see if you are getting any direct traffic, if you are then you must be on there somewhere.

With that In mind I turned too my favourite Firefox plugin, and the results where quite amazing. I found:

• Blogroll links to me I never knew
• Comments left by Matt Cutts on other blogs, linking here that I never knew
• Blog posts featuring me I never knew

So what is this tool?…StumbleUpon.

So…How do I Find Things?

This part is simple, and to be honest it can be really, really enjoyable. Especially if you find positive things you never knew about.

If you aren’t familiar with the search function in StumbleUpon then you are really missing out, simply go to the all option on your toolbar and click down to search (or check the image to the right). You should see a little search box and from there you can start discovering things you never knew. I didn’t think I would find anything new but try it; you will be surprised.

So what types of things should you search for?

• Your name
• The name of your blog / website
• Names of products and services that you offer
• …anything else that may be linked to you

I’m not sure if StumbleUpon actually reads the whole text on a page (someone can enlighten me in the comments?) but I assume they do because I find it hard to see people tagging comments left by others with my name as a tag for the SU review.

Good luck on your hunt, feel free to let us know what you find!