How to Manage Your Online Reputation

There are two sides to regulating your online reputation. For starters, if you have a social network showcasing party pictures and friends posting crude inside jokes on a message board, censor it. Not everyone has the attitude of ‘People know it’s just a social profile.’ Recruiters are searching for what pops up about you and judging you on it. Make sure those privacy settings are enabled, so only close friends can see everything about you.

And if you don’t have a profile on a social network, what are you waiting for? It’s easy to create a professional-looking online presense at no cost:

LinkedIn.com is a social network focused around the professional world. The site reports there are 19 million profiles. Profiles can be simple and list work and school experiences, and you connect with other business acquaintances. People you are linked with can write recommendations on your profile.

Start a blog. Sites like Blogger.com (run by Google) or WordPress.com let you create one for free. Just pick a topic that is relevant to your professional life and write in it often. Don’t feel pressured that it has to have 1,000 readers a day. It’s OK if only your best friend reads it. If nothing else, it’s something you can be proud of a recruiter finding when they do a search on your name.

VisualCV.com gives you the tools to create a free multimedia-filled online resume. The site lets you upload videos, charts and other documents to showcase your portfolio of work.

Want to have your own webpage with YourName.com? It’s not free, but it’s an inexpensive investment to have one place to highlight examples of your work. Some sites charge a minimal fee and come with basic Web design tools. Yahoo.com’s GeoCities charges about $9 a month and offers applications to walk you through building a page without knowing much HTML.

If you want to give yourself a crash course in webpage design and HTML language, there are free tutorial sites, such as w3schools.com and htmldog.com.