Look at Penelope Trunk. She talks about abortion, sex, divorce, bulimia, mental wards and dating on her blog, even though its primary focus is careers. She also says her blog is about her. “But each of you has a list of things in your life similar to that, it’s just a list you don’t want to talk about. I’m not special — I don’t have more stuff that is difficult to talk about. I just have more difficulty not talking about difficult stuff,” she says.

But she is special. She succeeds in revealing everything about herself because she has a solid brand and career that works for her. For most of us, being open and revealing such stories might not go as well. They could affect future jobs, gigs and relationships.

So how do you know what’s right for you? Review the following things about yourself:

Your job: Are you a freelancer? Are you planning a corporate career? Are you the owner of your business? Are you working for others, even as a independent contractor? If you’re looking for more gigs and clients, then you may need to step back and decide what those potential clients should and should not know about you.

Your brand: Some folks have built a brand for being brazen and can get away with cussing, revealing intimate details about their lives. For example, my brand is conservative, yet casual and personable. The conservative part overrules the casual, which means that cussing in public would be counter-intuitive. On the other hand, Mike “Toilet Paper Entrepreneur” Michalowicz has a potty mouth in his book, which fits his brand.

Your future: Where do you see yourself in one, five and ten years from now? I’m not a fan of this job interview question. But this isn’t a job interview. This simply looks at where you think you and your career will be. The information you post online today will still be around years from now even if you delete it.

Your personal life: What you say could affect your family. What if a college admissions person finds a negative story I tell about my daughter? (Not that I have one to tell, mind you.) I don’t want to impact any of her chances of getting into the right college. If anyone should affect her chances, it’s her. I wouldn’t talk about my husband looking for a job (no, I’m not hinting this either) because his current employer could find my statement and use it against him.

As for me, I talk openly about my being profoundly deaf and my family. However, I avoid mentioning their names, and telling stories of their bad days. It’s not that I’m a private person, but some things don’t belong out there for all to see. One of my kids has a challenge, which I talk about in person and leave it off the Internet.

I share my stories about being deaf to give people insight into what it’s like to lead a life without one of our five senses. It’s my hope it’ll educate them to be understanding when they meet people who are a little different from the norm. No matter what you see, I have the same hopes and wants as you do.

Remember Pandora’s box? It’s up to you to decide how much you want to reveal and what the consequences could be. Nancy Nally says it best in Personal Branding and Self-Censorship Online, “So, what you get from me online is 100 percent me…but you don’t get 100 percent of me.” That’s me, too.

How do you decide what to reveal and what to keep to yourself?

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While I believed in my output and knew that the customer was satisfied with my work, I didn’t want these projects to be the first thing that potential clients saw. After all, I hadn’t written about dating for several years. I wanted to focus my writing efforts on business, freelancing and travel.

If you’ve ever done low quality work, accepted a project only for the money, changed niches, or even worked on something ethically dubious, you might understand this situation. There are just some past projects that should be buried by your current ones.

How can you make sure that happens?

Highlight your best work. To reduce the negative effect that an embarrassing project has on your portfolio, focus on promoting your best work instead. Revamp your portfolio to include only relevant, high-quality samples. If you use social media, put them at the foreground when discussing your work.

Work the search engines. My problem with the embarrassing e-book projects was that they belonged to the top three search engine results for my name. This meant that anyone — from potential employers to curious friends — would find that project if they typed my name into Google. If you can easily find your “bad” project using your name as the search term, here are some ways to fix it:

• Purchase your own domain name if you haven’t done so already. Many new web workers tell me that they just can’t afford to buy their own domain name and set up a blog. But what they really can’t afford is the lack of control over what shows up first when you enter their names (or the name of their business) in search engines. This is why it’s important to get domain names based on your real name and your business name. Anything you pair up with it — a blog, a splash page or a static site — has a good chance of ranking well.

You don’t necessarily have to buy hosting and code your own site, either. You can point your domain name to your LinkedIn or Facebook profiles or to a free hosted blog (such as Blogger or Tumblr).

• Get backlinks. Once you have your domain name make sure people link to it. This is easier to do with a blog, since it’s more encouraging to link to something that contains an interesting idea or discussion, rather than just a personal profile. Also, it’s better if they use your real name as the anchor text.

• Learn the basics of on-site SEO. You don’t need to be an SEO (search engine optimization) guru to get your professional blog to rank well for your name. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of misinformation out there, and using some of those techniques might make your blog look spammy. Here’s a good introduction that talks about capitalizing on simple, long-term tactics rather than the “SEO trick of the month”.

Contact the person in charge, if applicable. Since the agreement with my previous client involved using a pseudonym for the dating e-books, I immediately contacted him about it. In a polite email I asked if he could use my old pseudonym for the books. He apologized and told me that he had simply forgotten about our agreement when he had his site and the e-books redesigned. He then corrected this oversight and changed the byline.

This approach may not be useful to those who have different arrangements. Still, if you can do it without upsetting anyone and it’s within the limits of your contract, it doesn’t hurt to ask a previous client to change the credit or byline. They can be very understanding if you explain the situation well.

Become more conscious of these projects from now on. As the old adage goes, prevention is better than cure. Go uncredited or use a pseudonym for projects that aren’t up to your usual standards or that are incompatible with your personal brand. Your future self will thank you.

Remember that whatever happens and no matter how shameful your previous projects may be, it’s important to stay honest. If ever someone asks you directly about these projects, tell the truth and accept it with grace. These projects may be embarrassing, but it’s more bearable than being caught in a lie.

Have you ever worried about embarrassing projects from the past? How have they affected your brand?

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With that said, it’s possible to have too many objectives. Narrow your focus on one or two objectives to keep things simple. Otherwise, you’ll spend too much time on your blog, and not enough time on your work.

Determine scope and themes. What topics are you going to write about? A good starting point would be about your industry or the work that you do. This is something that you have a lot of knowledge and experience with. For example, graphic designer David Airey discusses the different aspects of graphic design on his blog — from how to work with designers to logo design to typography. These are all topics that are relevant to his work, and writing about them displays his expertise.

But this doesn’t mean you should limit yourself to writing about one topic only. As long as you can make connections among varied topics, you won’t confuse your readers. For example, Chris Guilleabeau successfully writes about travel, writing, goal setting and even marketing. His unique angle is about “unconventional thinking,” so all his posts use that approach, even if the topics covered seem broad.

Use an authentic voice. How you write is just as important as what you write. If you try too hard to sound like someone else, your posts are going to seem contrived. Because of this, it’s best to stick with writing the way you talk. Write the way you’d discuss the topic with a friend or close colleague. Don’t use words that you have to look up in the dictionary. By sticking to your own voice, you’re letting your personality shine through. Also, it’s easier!

Schedule. When and how often you post is important. This sets reader expectations and allows you to plan for posts accordingly. For my professional blog, I only update it once a month. This may sound extremely infrequent, but the theme of my blog is about low-noise productivity. It would be hypocritical of me to write about that if I posted twice a day. I’d prefer that my readers spend their time working on exciting projects and putting my advice into practice.

Choose your format. Although blogging was originally a written medium, you don’t have to limit yourself to written content. As an artist, Michael Nobbs has illustrations and comics as the highlight of his posts, and he also uploads podcasts. Choose the formats that you’re most comfortable with.

Make conscious improvements. If you have an existing blog, look at your archives from last year. I bet there’s at least one post that makes you cringe. As the years go by, you’ll gain more professional experience and become a better communicator. Make a conscious effort to reflect this improvement in your writing (or video blogging, or podcasting).Your audience might not notice it at first, but when someone — including yourself — looks at your track record, the improvement will be obvious. And who doesn’t want to work with someone who keeps getting better at what they do?

Here’s the secret: you don’t have to obsess about your content strategy, especially when posting regularly becomes a habit. You just have to do what feels natural to you. But taking time to prepare your objectives, intentions, schedule and scope allows you to clearly set out and remember what is natural for you, before you get sidetracked with what other people are telling you to do with your blog.

Do you have a professional blog? How do you plan for your posts?

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The thing I personally wrestle with the most about my own personal branding is finding the balance between being transparent and yet protecting my professional reputation and marketability.

I believe wholeheartedly in being myself in social media. But could being myself hurt me? There is no way to make everyone happy when you discuss divisive topics like politics and religion. You inevitably are going to disagree with someone, and leave behind a negative impression of you in a space where there is no separation of your business and personal life. So I do self-censor when it comes to my online presence. Why invite the downside of expressing my views, when I don’t see an upside that outweighs it?

Here’s how I balance being real, and being marketable.

What I Share

I do share a lot of myself in social media, mostly via Twitter and Facebook. I talk about the tech in my life, of course. I post about my favorite TV shows. NASCAR commentary and Disney trips also show up often in my Twitter stream. I share the trials and tribulations (and joys) of life raising an autistic 6-year-old daughter. Above all else, anyone who follows my Twitter stream sees a good bit of my wry, sarcastic (and sometimes goofy) sense of humor.

What I Don’t Share

Despite all I share, there are some things I keep to myself. During the U.S. election last year, I never discussed party politics or revealed who I voted for. I also give religion a wide berth. I do have strong opinions on those topics, but there’s no need to discuss them through social media and risk offending someone. Another thing you won’t find in my online presence is obscenities. Although anyone who’s ever been a passenger while I was driving knows that I do swear, I keep it clean online. Since it is possible someone might be offended, I just err on the side of caution and stick to clean, non-offensive language.

So, what you get from me online is 100 percent me…but you don’t get 100 percent of me.

This may not be the right method for everyone. Some people may not need to be completely non-offensive. Being controversial can even be a personal brand.  It is something of a sliding spectrum. Depending on your career and your reasons for being online, your needs to censor your image may vary. It’s probably never smart to put up pictures of drunk partying on Facebook, but for people who are online for purely social reasons, talking about their political or religious beliefs may never cause them an issue other than maybe costing them a few online friends.

Whatever our online brand, all of us should be aware of the effect of anything that we put out there about ourselves, and consider the potential cost to our brand. Being transparent doesn’t necessarily have to mean letting it all hang out.

Where do you fall on the personal branding spectrum? Do you limit what you reveal online?

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The book begins by providing background on the importance of managing your company’s reputation online and the potential consequences if you don’t. It follows with practical instruction on using tools like social media and search engine optimization as ways to be proactive about managing your online reputation in order to achieve your business goals. The final section is about online monitoring of your reputation and managing an online reputation crisis.

The big emphasis in “Radically Transparent” is on being proactive in reputation management. The book’s practical recommendations center around creating a positive reputation through the use of tools like social media and blogs, instead of waiting to respond to critics in a crisis where you would always be playing catch-up. The philosophy is that actively building and monitoring your reputation can actually prevent a crisis from happening.

Some of the book’s sections (such as “The Power Of Blogs”) may be somewhat basic for WebWorkerDaily readers, but in total “Radically Transparent” is a very practical and comprehensive textbook on the topic of online reputation management. It won’t go over the heads of those who are inexperienced in the online marketing, but at the same time I believe even the most experienced online marketer will come away from “Radically Transparent” having picked up a few new tips and techniques.

If you work in marketing, this book would be a good recommendation for clients reluctant to implement online reputation management. For freelancers or small business owners, reading this book (and then sticking it on your bookshelf for references) will give you a great background in reputation and crisis management.

Although the book uses the stories of the online reputation problems of several large companies like Dell and JetBlue as examples, the lessons it contains aren’t limited to large companies — the authors translate the such experiences to apply them to the management of an individual’s reputation. Personal reputation management (or personal branding) is especially important to freelance web workers. Their online reputation is usually just as important as their off-line reputation.

In a way, the core message of the book is a slightly down one because it takes a somewhat fatalistic approach to the inherent negativity of the Internet. The core philosophy underlying the need for proactive reputation management is the assumption that it is “inevitable” that all of us will have our reputation attacked at some point. Unfortunately many of us can attest to the truth of that statement.

Interested in reading “Radically Transparent” for yourself? Chapter 1 is available for download as a PDF from the Radically Transparent web site.

Have you read “Radically Transparent”? Are you proactive about your reputation online?

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This is something we have to ask ourselves as web workers.  In fact, our clients are probably asking us this very question through subtext, we just aren’t aware of it.  Important as this question may be, there is another question that should be considered:

Do you appear trustworthy?

Online credibility is especially important for us, since it’s likely that our online presence is the only thing potential customers will see.  In this increasingly searchable world, we need to use every means possible to establish that we are worthy of a client’s trust. Here are some ways in which we can do this:

Make sure your website looks trustworthy. Unfair as it may seem, image matters – especially online.  A few years ago, Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab started The Web Credibility Project.  One of the studies they did was to find out what drove internet users to trust specific websites.  This study resulted in ten guidelines that, when followed, reinforces the credibility of one’s website.  Here are some of the guidelines:

• Show that there’s a real organization behind your site.
• Highlight the expertise in your organization and in the content and services you provide.
• Make it easy to contact you.
• Design your site so it looks professional (or is appropriate for your purpose).

Be consistent in your personal brand. Wherever you go online, as long as you can be found by potential clients, you need to carry a personal brand that reflects the quality of your work.  And that brand has to be consistent.

For example, if you want to be known as the go-to copywriter for Fortune 500 companies, it makes no sense to add slogans against “The Man” and big corporations on your Twitter account (regardless of how fun that might be).  Your clients need the assurance that you are exactly who they think you are.  Any deviation from that leaves room for doubt about your intentions and sincerity.

It also helps to go the extra mile with your personal branding, making your work ethic and values clear to the casual observer.  After all, you can never tell when a future client might get her first impression of you.  It could be via your blog, LinkedIn profile, or a website you created three years ago.

To help with your branding, you can create an online visual identity. You can also maximize your ability to customize your social networking tools.  I recall that Mike Gunderloy recently wrote about customizing your Twitter background to reflect your brand.  It’s a great idea, and I think I’m going to take his lead on this one and try it myself.

Give a timely response to everything. Potential clients and business partners tend to be finicky about communication, especially in the first months of working with you.  They need to know that you are reliable, and that you can respond to their every question as soon as possible.  Why is that?

I think it’s because with every day you spend not replying to an essential question or comment, your client’s trust in you falls a step lower.  The silence gives them the chance to think about certain questions such as “Has this contractor run off with my money?” and “Will she submit the deliverables on time?”  If we do our jobs well, they shouldn’t have to ask these questions.

Be aware of who talks about you online (and what they say). If you haven’t created a Google Alert for your name, whether it’s your own name or your business’ name, now is the time to do it.  If anyone makes unfair and negative comments about your business, you need to set the record straight and put out fires as soon as possible.  Otherwise, you might lose potential leads without your knowledge.

These are only a few things you can do to secure your credibility online, but there are definitely more ways to do it.  Have you tried any of them?  Are there other methods you’ve tried?  How did they work for you?

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