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Googling Yourself

one of my favorite things to do. Five or friends is to be able to google myself and the google other friends of mine. So as part of our personal branding course, your personal brand is largely determined by what other people have to say about you and what happens when you google your name. Okay, do you google your name, admit it, You do and it's not an egotistical thing to do. Okay so let's just google my name and by the way, the results that you see when you google yourself are not necessarily the same results that other people see why, because if you're logged into google then google is going to show you things that are biased to what you like to do. So if you really want to be, you know pure about this, then here you have an ampersand ASAP W. S equals zero and add just add that in there and that will give you a clean set of results as if someone else was doing these searches notice that the results are different than what I just showed you before. Okay, let me go back. Now look, you...

should have Your website rank is # one and by the way the purple link means I've already been there and the site links, if you have site links, that means that google thinks that you're authoritative and then your social media profiles should show up next. Typically I prefer seeing linkedin behind this or your company site behind this but here I have twitter because that's being indexed by google but google doesn't seem to like to show facebook stuff, Do they noticed they don't like to show that. So that's why we like to cross post now. Look, you can see there's other links here, right? There's these videos, there's news and some of these reviews, right? And this is what's called Universal Search facebook wants to show a range of items because who knows do they want to see your biography? They want to see your Wikipedia, they want to see your website, they want to see what you're doing on social, they want to see. So they're showing a whole range of these items and you'll see a slightly different set of results on mobile too. Now some people, they have a very common kind of name like my Buddy KC Adams. So when I search for Casey Adams, I see his instagram because that's where he puts in his time and his podcasts that are here. But when I come here to google Knowledge panel, I don't see him. I see other stuff which is a shame. And then maybe I see my look for my buddy Karen O'brien. And you can also see in this knowledge panel, this is the share. So let's click on this. I can see you can see this whole area here is called the google knowledge panel. Karen O'brien is an actor. Well it's too bad that my Buddy Karen O'brien who is a Young adult, he's 19 and he's got his little sports car agency. Well he's not showing up because someone else has got his name. Oh, he's not even here either. He's actually nowhere here on the first page. And none of these are him. None of these are him. Well, maybe this Youtube is young. Maybe, maybe not even that. Oh look, this knowledge panels not even claimed, maybe I could try to claim it. Right? And by the way, if you have a common name, it's tougher for you to be able to claim this and be able to dominate the first page. So if you go through the exercises we're talking about in building your personal brand where you distribute content across all these different channels linkedin, facebook twitter website Cora. Right, that's sending a signal over here to facebook now, what if you have a negative search result? What are you gonna do about that? It's called reputation management. I still consider that part of personal branding. So that's why we're covering this here in the personal branding course. So, I'll show you. So, my, my friend Sebastian remember to, he is the original soup Nazi, remember the soup Nazi in Seinfeld. Right, No soup for you. Well, he is the original Superman started a chain of 57 super franchise restaurants kind of like, you know, Krispy Kreme and Dunkin donuts. He started the the soup man chain all over new york and it spread across the United States and then some bad stuff happened where and it looks worse than what it actually was. But then he some of the money that he raised or some of the people that that put money so that he can expand his superman franchise into the supermarkets and all that. We're actually part of the mafia. And then if you googled his name, you would see Sebastian Romesha and the like indicted and largest federal racketeering whatever charges. Well here it looks like it's popped back up on the second page indictment of top executives. The second setback and it's on the new york times Holy moly. Right by the way, you want to know you ever heard the joke, where do you hide a dead body on the second page of google because people don't go to the second page. And so if you did a search for Sebastian, remember in the last 10 years you would see that new york Times article pop up to the top why? Because google gives additional waiting to high authority sites like news sites and major sites that are really popular. Could be social media sites, but mostly it's like news and media. And so the way we've pushed it down as you can see is we've created additional profiles. We've built other websites. We've made sure that he's on twitter. We made sure that you know, we have all these positive articles about the suit man and then here's something that's kind of a bonus for you. So in case someone types in Sebastian domestic crime or something related to that, we don't want that negative thing to pop up. So then we would have a blog post that said Sebastian Romero to his soup is so good. It's a crime, right? So that way we get our stuff ranking on that. So reputation management is not about deleting those negative results, it's about pushing them down. So they get to the second page and that means producing lots of content. So it's the same thing that you're going to do in personal branding. The best way to build to protect yourself is to have a strong personal brand in advance of nasty things that happened, right? Because if you already have these items claimed, then it's like wearing your bulletproof armor before you get shot at versus getting shot and then later going to the hospital and having them try to remove the bullets for you. I'd rather put the bullet proof armor on now and be preemptive and do a lot of the precautionary stuff. So you know, the best time to build a personal brand is now before you have these problems and maybe, you know, you're doing it as an entrepreneur, you just want to be a little better known or you're competing against your friends, there's nothing wrong with that, start putting together your personal brand so that you own that first page of google and that way, no matter what happens later, you never know what's gonna happen, you're you're gonna have a strong personal brand. Now look up here by default, it's all but you've got image news, videos, all these things you want to dominate all of these. And so when you go to to video, look sebastian, rheumatic coffee, sebastian Vettel coffee beans, we have all these different things here that are ranking here so we can protect his name, right? We grow the best coffee beans. Well, it's easy to dominate by the way, if you're not dominating here in all, because there's someone who's just better known, like an actor or worse, a porn star, I can't tell you how many friends of mine where they just happen to have a name. That's the same as a porn star because it's a common name, like two first names, right? The best way to start building a brand is to start ranking on videos. So make these one minute videos and as you start to see Your videos pop up here in the top 10 in video search results under your name, then It will eventually make it to kind of the, the greatest hits here, which is the top 10 among all these different results. And if you want to see if, let's say, you know, you produce some content and you're a little bit downhearted because you don't see it popping up in the 1st 30 days, do this in the title. Now, you're looking at how many pages have your name in the title of the page and there's much, much fewer results. So now you're looking at how much competition there is. So if I do an entitled search and there's more than say like 10,000 results, I know that's pretty competitive right here. There's 2 98. So it's actually not that hard to dominate for this guy because it's a relatively uncommon name. Unfortunately he had something nasty happened to him and it's a new york Times article, which is oh my goodness, those are hard to push down. It took us a while to push this one down, but if we do entitled my name, which is actually a pretty common name because it's like, you know, you and chinese is like smith in you know Western cultures, I mean two letters, I mean, how many combinations are there? 26 times. 26. So look, there's 67,000 of these that have Dennis you in the title. So I kinda wanna dominate this as much as I can. And there's actually another dentist, you who is an actor and Hong kong film producer. But I've dominated this. If you did a search 10 years ago, I had like nothing here. Right, so I'm literally practicing what I preach here, so you can see I dominate all the results over here have claimed this. And also notice how many videos I have notice here, like these other guest blog posts. So I don't really blog much on my own site, believe it or not because people say, hey Dennis, you're not blocked for the last three months, are you not creating content? Of course I'm creating content but I'm putting it on lots of other sites and the reason why and this is something you can learn because I worked at a search engine 20 years ago called Yahoo if you remember it, it was the bomb was before google and the search engines are looking for diversity of domains. So if I'm on many, many domains that is harder to fool. I mean that it's harder for a spammer to do that. So it sends a stronger search signal to the search engine if you're on multiple domains. So I literally would write, write blog posts that would be on other people's sites. And here Dennis you, is he really a facebook ads expert? Right. And I did that because I wanted to write a Clickbait headline and this is actually an article I wrote about myself. You can see, I visited This page three times and I love to write articles on other people's sites, especially if my website is brand new. Maybe you haven't built your website yet. That's okay. Put it up. Put just like a couple of articles on there just so it can start to rank, make sure it's showing up in the index when you search for it could be on the second page and here it is. Right? So it's talking about these other people and you can see I'm linking to other articles and content that I'm producing and that's how I'm building a stronger personal brand, because google is absolutely looking at weather articles linked to each other, which is the same thing as voting from one another, right? You want to have these things vote for one another. So you want to have your blog post, link to your facebook and your facebook linked to your twitter and have different links linked to all these other items and that's how you're going to be able to manage your reputation. That's how you're growing your brand when you google yourself and then you want, you don't want to google yourself more than say like once every two weeks. If you do it too often, then you're potentially going to pollute your results. In other words, you might think that you're doing better than you actually are because google is just going to show you stuff that you have been clicking on. Right? Look at all the items that are coming up on twitter, especially where there's a whole panel for twitter, There's a whole panel here for video, right? I love to take articles and split them into lots of little videos or take videos and split them in the articles, distribute across lots of places and that's how we dominate. Universal Search by default, you are in universal Search because they are showing you a variety of items here. Okay. And you want to go into your google account and your google account, they'll show you all the items that are here. Google does have their own social network with pages and all this. But you know, I think that stuff is going away because they've tried to do social networks but look, I can decide what information I want to show, see what people want to see and see who my friends are. Right. All good stuff. Make sure you're managing these settings and there might be stuff that you don't want to show. Maybe it's a previous company, maybe it's something that was like on my space that you're kind of embarrassed of you forgot 10 years ago. But the key when you google yourself or you google other friends of yours. And by the way, if you do a search here it's the same as if you do it on google dot com. It's the search bar and the address bar actually. Now the same thing. So here's my buddy Matthew Daniel said he's the ceo of escape fitness. He doesn't have a knowledge panel I guess he's not big enough. It would both be over here on the right and you could see his websites not showing up instead his linkedin his instagram his facebook youtube videos, twitter. That's good. That's good that he's dominating the first page. He does have a relatively Uncommon name. There's only 18,000 results and I didn't even do an entitled Search. Well these are all rented properties. Facebook linked into its social and they're all rented. So who knows what might change with these? I really want to own my own property. I want to own my name. And if you don't have a first name last name dot com, you need to get that. And if that's already taken then try something else. But please, if you can make it a dot com, don't make it a dot net or dot Io or dot org or don't put a dash in it. Which is what mine has. Which is crazy. But try try something else. It could be, you know, a domain name that has a couple of letters like maybe your maybe Dylan Collins has already taken. Maybe Dylan Collins dot com has already taken. But then you have go Dylan Collins or the real Dylan Collins or something like that. Right? So you want like this is Dylan Collins. Oh by the way, this is a good example, My friend Dylan Collins is 24. It's this one but google is confused. So they have Dylan Collins. Who is a software entrepreneur. That's this guy. This one they have Dylan Collins. Who is this guy? That's a different guy and they had this guy, there's like a bunch of these different Dylan Collins. They're not all the same. Dylan Collins. Okay. That might be what you have Born in 1980, years old. I guarantee you this guy is not 39 years old, Is he 39 years old? No, he's not. Right. So Google gets confused. So start to link you're different assets together. That will help google understand which john smith is, which john smith isn't it funny? Like you think google knows everything. But if you trust google, who knows? I mean, if they make mistakes, that's not a good thing. So, and you know, the T. S. A. And border security and these guys are relying upon social media to decide who should be let through the border. And the chinese are using social media to determine whether you're a criminal or not. So there's actually a good reason for you to tune your personal branding. You might say, well I don't, I'm not worried about my privacy. I'm not doing anything bad. So I have nothing to be ashamed of. Well, you might accidentally get matched against someone who is doing something bad. I'm not trying to scare you. I'm just saying, hey, it's good to be preemptive and take care of your personal brand. So anyway, this is what you want to look at as you're googling yourself, make sure that all of your content is showing up here. So you can own that first page. Last tip for you do a site colon on your domain and let's see how many results you have and let's take a look at whether these results are considered fresh or authoritative by the search engine. So you can see there's 1200 results and then there might be more than this. But this is all google is willing to show if they deem deem that your website is low authority, then there crawl power is going to be a little bit less. So maybe their only crawl the 1st 10 pages or maybe they just stop after a while because they don't consider your site to be authoritative. If you're CNN or ESPN or Wall Street Journal, then you're highly authoritative. And they put a lot of extra power to crawl your site. So you can see these are the articles that Google thinks are the best on my site, Michael Jackson's will and funeral arrangements. We remember when Michael Jackson died, we made a whole bunch of facebook ads about him and we sold different items related to that. I know it's a little opportunistic, but we made some money on that. I guess that's what Google thinks is the most interesting Then my homepage then me as a speaker than other items of liposuction liposuction client. The blog, us hiring other people. But what do you think it is that determines how google decides what pages come first and it's not necessarily the homepage as you can see that comes first. It's what's getting the most traffic and what Google sees users spending the most time on. So let's take a look at my site just for a moment and by the way, this is built on a $10 theme. You can have your site built on Fiverr. Right? Whatever it might be. And let's just say that, you know, I am. Let's see. Maybe the only the about page. No, that's too easy. I'll make it, I'll go to a page. This, it's gonna be harder to find, let's say on my blog. So you should have a blog on your personal brand side. Right, okay. Here's my blog and I'm using the keywords that I want to rank for. Right in here. Right? And let's say that I go to this and I want to see is this is this blog post Maybe because I've had it transcribed or maybe it's old. Is it authoritative? Right. Does google like this page or not? And this is something almost nobody knows. So what I do is I go to any page. It could be my company page. It could be a product page. It could be my personal brand. It could be anything that's visible to google. I don't know why this is taking so long, but let's just let go to this one for example and let's go down here to the bottom let's grab this unique phrase, funeral sites. Oh, I know I did this because we have a client that's a funeral home. So we're talking about what would happen when a celebrity dies and how the funeral arrangements are different. So I'm taking that phrase actually, let's take let's take this whole thing as a phrase. And let's search for that here in google. And let's see if it pops up and there it is here it pops up and then I'm going to click the triangle and I'm going to click on cash. So first off, I want to see is that that text snippet popping up? And then if it's there, I'm gonna go to the cash And it'll say December six, you can see today is December nine. So three days ago. So that's not too bad. But if I find that my content is more than a week old, then it means that my site isn't quite strong enough or that particular page on the site isn't strong enough. So if you're not ranking on google for your name off of your website, it might be that your content is not strong enough because your domain doesn't have enough authority