The Disgusting Truth About Reputation Management

If you’ve been with me for any period of time, you know that I do Reputation Management.  In fact, I have a training program that teaches other people how to do it, too.

Reputation Management as a service is a VERY delicate art.  If done wrong, you and your clients could end up in jail or owing thousands upon thousands of dollars in fines.

While I haven’t reviewed anyone else’s Reputation Management training programs, I heard that one of them suggests for you to leave negative reviews for potential clients to increase their need for your help.  That’s possibly the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard.  The truth is that people who need your help already know they need it and will be grateful for your help.  It’s honestly an easy sale when you’re going after the right customers and nobody should EVER leave a negative review for a business that doesn’t deserve a negative review.

Most Reputation Management service providers are even worse.  Their strategies are stuck in 2003 and they are robbing their customers each and every single day…

Did you know that it’s against FTC regulations to purchase fake reviews?  Click here to see a company that the FTC slammed with a $250,000 fine.  How would you feel if you caused that much of a fine for one of your clients?  Even better, their competitors would be happy to alert the government to something like this.  A fine that large would put nearly any business “out-of-business”.

If a Reputation Management specialist goes out and starts buying domains with the words “scam”, “ripoff” or any other negative word with your company name, find them and slap them repeatedly.  By building websites around such terms, you’re telling Google that there is a reason for terms like that to be suggested.  Then, actual human beings will begin typing terms like that in while searching for info about your company (which tells Google that they were right to think “scam” is a good word to associate with your business).  The simple solution to changing Google’s suggestions is to give them better ones, not confirm the negative statements.

Even better, most of the companies that follow that strategy usually post the same crappy article to each wordpress blog they setup.  If you’re lucky, it’s badly spun, unreadable content that makes the company look partly stupid.  This strategy stopped working ages ago.  If a company wants to follow this strategy the right way, each site has to offer unique value to the user.  The domains would need to have a positive focus with the goal of making the company look good with every new possibility of becoming visible to potential prospects.  Any other way is sheer lunacy.

Many Reputation Management service providers never take the time to find out what the true problem is that’s causing negative reviews and Rip-off Reports to show up on the web in the first place.  This creates a vicious circle where they fix the first problem posts and more negative ones keep popping up negating any impact they’re making.  This is good for their business and keeps clients needing to pay them, but it’s a pretty shady way of guaranteeing that money comes in…  The first thing any Reputation Management service provider should do is address the true cause for the things making people feel the need to be negative about their client’s business.  With so many prospects for this service, it’s silly to cause pain to a paying customer just to keep them paying.  Plus, it’s pretty easy to downgrade a happy customer to a “protection” type package once the initial service is completed.

All of these dirty reasons and a few more are why I put together Reputation Takeover (formerly Rep Mogul) to teach people the right way to perform Reputation Management for the thousands upon thousands of businesses that need it.  If your business needs Reputation Management, contact me directly.  If I can’t help, I have more than a thousand happy customers that would love to.

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