Have you ever searched your name in Google, only to find less than desirable results popping up in the first ten results? The first ten organic results of any search are the ones that people will find the most relevant on the topic they are seeking. Consider your name as your personal brand. If your brand is a topic that holds negative items in the top ten search results, then your biggest goal should be to remove those negative results as quickly as possible.

One of the best ways to make sure that your brand gets positive focus on the internet is through branding and reputation management with social media. Web 2.0 technologies such as blogging, micro-blogging and social networking can be valuable tools in the effort to raise good items about your brand to the top of search results, thus bumping down any negative information. The best part is that most of these technologies can be utilized for little to no cost at all.

The first place to start in Web 2.0 reputation management is blogging. Let’s say that your brand is your name, and for example purposes, we’ll use John Smith. So what you will want to do is to get some blogs rolling with your name in the blog’s title and URL. If your name is relatively unique, you can probably acquire a domain name such as johnsmith.com, assuming that you do not already have this for your main website. If you do not, then I would suggest you purchase your name as a domain right away, which can be done for less than $15 per year. Along with your domain, you would also need to purchase hosting, which can be as little as $5 per month. Both can be acquired through companies such as GoDaddy.

Once you purchase your domain and hosting account, you can install a blogging application such as WordPress easily through your hosting services’ control panel. Then, you are able to start blogging. Two to three articles per week are enough to help your domain boost to the top of search results.

Now, let’s assume that you already are using your brand as a domain. There are other blogging options that you still can use in conjunction to having your own domain. Blogger, WordPress and Livejournal offer free blogging accounts that you can create with your brand in their URL, such as johnsmith.blogspot.com, johnsmith.wordpress.com and johnsmith.livejournal.com respectively. Combined with your main domain, if you create unique articles for each blog, you can gain the first four positions of major search engine results with these customized domains for your brand.

The next place to turn to is micro-blogging. Twitter is the most popular micro-blogging site. It allows you to create an account on which you post 140 character status updates as often as you please. Again, try to get your name as the user name to create a Twitter url such as twitter.com/johnsmith. Be sure to link your main domain and free blogs to this Twitter account, and make two to three “tweets” per day, and voila, another positive reference to your brand will ultimately emerge in the top search results.

After blogging and micro-blogging, there is a plethora of social networks that rank highly in search results. LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace are just a few of the many social networking avenues to turn to. Whenever you create accounts on these sites, be sure to use your name as the customized URL when available, and link these accounts to your main domain and blogs, then vice versa.

Finally, look at other highly ranked accounts that you can create with focus on your name. For example, if you write articles, authority article sites like EzineArticles will create a link with your name as an expert author, which tends to rank highly in search results. Services such as KnowEm UserName Check also help you find even more networks where you can use search for your name and see which networks have it available for the taking.

In conclusion, the more unique web sites and services that you start with your name as a user name, the more positive results you are getting indexed into search engines. With the right amount of focus on each of these avenues, in time, you will be able to put nothing but positive items in search results for your name and brand.