Lots of you are starting to use these tips and by all reports you are showing success already! Congratulations!

Now lets get started.

#20 Build a Digital Identity.

The easiest way to build a digital identity is through social networking. Many of you are already part of social networking sites and that’s good – there are over 200,mm users……..on sites like MySpace and if My Space were a country it would be the 5th largest country in the world.

For professionals though, MySpace may not be the best network and the tip here is – find the right network. There are others out there like, LinkedIn, Inman Community also has the ability to create a profile, Zillow and Trulia  Facebook is one a lot of people talk about recently and there are some interesting ways you can engage in that social network.

I would suggest if you haven’t done so already, take a page from FaceBook – create a page for your company or for your brand in addition to your individual profile. The reason you want to create a page on FaceBook is quite simple, you create a following by encouraging others to become a fan and then you can send messages to them giving you an immediate opt in marketing list for you. So if people identify themselves as fans of your company or brand, you can now market to them legally. It is a much more powerful program over just having a profile in FaceBook.

Some other places to take pages and create a profile for your business are:Ziki, ClaimID, MerchantCircle and ultimately the granddaddy of them all – Wikipedia – if you can get a profile there your are golden.

Why does this matter, why should I spend any time maintaining my digital identity and putting all these profiles out there? Well, there is one very simple reason and that’s Google! What do I mean by that ……….. well here’s an interesting stat………..11% of adult searchers admit they search the internet for information on that person they might hire or purchase from. And with time, that number will only go up. Therefore – it is really important for you, especially a small business professional or business person/owner should own the search results on your name.………..If you search your name, you should have control over every single one of those with the entries, the top 10 search results. Be sure you can control the results of a Google search on your name and brand.

#21 Look Who’s Talking.

At the end of the day the really important thing is what is being said about you or your Brand. All of these sites broadcast or share your brand with the world and it is important to control what other people are saying about you.

People are talking about you, right now, seriously, and it’s not always good things, so……There are sites out there like YahooLocal, Google, Yellowpages.com, Citysearch.com, Yelp.com and more that are all out there rating and ranking you as a business person/owner/professional. One bad review on one of these sites can really be bad for business so I believe it is imperative to own your identity and own those top spaces on Google. When anyone that is doing a search for you, we know the 11% of folks that are Googleing the people they work with or are thinking of hiring, the last thing you want to have happen is to have a negative response to show up on one of those sites.


#23 Monitor Your Reputation.

Not only do you have to be out there changing and building these identities you need to be monitoring it too. This is a staggering statistic ……… only 3% of self searchers make it a regular habit, they may have done it once or twice but that is not enough. The question I want to ask you is, do you Google yourself regularly? And if you do are you listening to that, are you subscribing to an alert system so you receive notification via email or RSS so that you receive messages of everything that is being said about you as soon as it comes in.

Google blog search and other tools will send you these alerts via email or via RSS. A tool for the Twitter service is called Tweetscan and there is the abililty to search on the Tweeter.com home page as well. Tweetscan is good because it also gives you that email and RSS capability to do a search for your name. You may not see much activity on this site today, but it is sure to come in the future.

There are services out there that help you do this like BlogLines, a good example. ……….. You can aggregate the RSS feeds to see your results. Trackur will actually do all this for you at about $18 per month. It is an online reputation monitoring service that you can go on and see just how many people are talking about you on a day to day basis.

#24 Get Social With Your Ads.

This is an interesting avenue on the FaceBook network where you can start to fish for the customers you want, knowing this is where the fish are. There are a lot of people on these social networking sites and FaceBook actually gives you the ability to create hyper targeted marketing advertising to those fish. You have the ability to go in and choose your targeting by geographical location, age, and also choose by interest level. So if you are promoting through your FaceBook page and trying to reach out to folks who are interested in Real Estate or Travel for example, you could create an ad to target men and women who live in Chicago, IL between the ages of 25 & 40 who are interested in real estate or travel. This platform allows you to get very granular with each particular ad.

Comments and questions encouraged. Contact us at marcia@minocquamortagage.com or www.minocquamortgage.com. We look forward to more of your success stories. Keep 'em coming.