Clean Up Your Online Presence and Brand

Tying it all in
This is where I bring out the big disclaimer that states, “do as I say and not as I do.” True confession time – my blogging brand is a mess. All my blogs look different from my Twitter background. I’m “readablefeast” at CafeMom and “mamacooks” at FoodBuzz. My business is The Write Spot, LLC, but I’m amnichols most places unless you know me as mamarant at BlogHer.com. Ugh!

That’s what happens when you start blogging years before anyone thought about branding and trying to fit multiple blogs in one brand. However, I have some ideas about how to clean up my blogging brand and online presence:

• Change several of my blog designs to echo the vintage Western theme of my Twitter background and business cards while keeping some of the current design elements and logos intact.
• Delete old social media profiles I no longer use. Or deleting some and reopening them using “amnichols” as my user name.
• Making sure when I create new social working profiles, I open them under the same user name.

Getting help online
One tool that can help this process is Knowem.com. KnowEm checks the availability of your brand name, user name or vanity URL on 120 popular social media websites. It can also help remind you where you opened an account or if someone could be posing as you somewhere else. (Now that’s a scary thought.)

If you have a business or feel your personal brand is important enough to invest in, for $64.95 (about .50 cents a name) KnowEm will fill out the registration on 120 of the popular social media sites with your user name and information in about 1 to 5 business days. That way you can avoid what they call “cyber squatting” or social media identity theft.

So what are you going to do today to clean up your online presence and brand?

Anne-Marie Nichols is the Social Media Manager at Mom Central Consulting. You can also find her blogging up some healthy recipes at This Mama Cooks!

Anne-Marie Nichols