If You Don’t Clean Up Your Image Now, You’ll Hate Yourself Later

In an ideal world everyone would know you for all the great things you have done and they wouldn’t know about the bad things that you may have done in the past. The problem is that some people, such as Ted Kaczynski have a tainted personal brand. In some cases it can be almost impossible to reverse the negative connotation with a personal brand, but here are some things you can do to help clean up your brand.

Stop ignoring and start responding
When people start slandering your name your gut reaction is probably to ignore it and hope it dies down. The problem with this approach is that it can lead to people that don’t even know you looking at you in a negative way. Instead of just ignoring the problem you should respond to them in an apologetic fashion and let them know you are listening to them and trying to fix the problem or issue that they have brought up. By doing this you are letting people know that you are listening which might start changing their perception.

If you have had people slandering your name in the past and you ignored it, go back and respond. It is never too late to try and fix your name.

Start doing some good
If you want to have your personal brand looked upon positively start helping others out. This could be anything from volunteering your time at a homeless shelter or simply just helping out people in your industry for free. Whatever the thing maybe it will just help combat the bad perception people have and it will even start creating a positive perception. Just make sure you are being genuine with your actions.

First impressions are the most important ones
Usually if you are branded in a negative way the search results are filled with these negative incidents. The last thing you want is for someone who is looking to learn more about you to search for you name on Google and find results that may look poorly on you. For example, I am known as a princess and when you search for “Neil Patel” there is a result that claims I am a princess. I personally don’t care about being called a princess but if I did I would flood the search results with more positive results. I would create blogs on all the major sites such as WordPress.com as well as create profiles on all the social sites like Netscape using my real name. Then I would try and increase the amount of links going to these profiles which would cause them to rank high for the term “Neil Patel” and would cause the princess result to disappear.

It may seem easy to flood the search results to improve your image, but it can also backfire. If you create profiles that can be modified by the public such as a Wikipedia entry random people can go in and edit the page to include all of the bad stuff you did in the past. So be careful when doing this.

Stop giving people more ammo
For you to create a positive brand you can’t give people anymore ammunition that will let them talk about your name in a negative way. So whatever you did in the past that caused people to slander you name, make sure you don’t do it again. Sounds simple, but people make this mistake every minute of every day.

Trying to reverse what people think of you isn’t an easy thing to do. It takes much more work trying to go from having a bad image to a good image than actually starting from scratch. This shouldn’t stop you from trying to create a positive brand, but since the damage has already been done you are going to have to put in countless hours and wait months if not years before you see the fruits of your labor.