How to protect your privacy while building your digital business – Watch Engine Watch

The Internet is both good and evil, depending on how you use it and how others use it to interact with you. After the pandemic, many new businesses and side issues emerged, while physical businesses began to digitize. This has created well-being challenges for how business owners and senior executives can separate work from their personal pockets via the Internet. How can they ensure that their privacy and online security are strong while building a digital business footprint?

Here are some things you need to know about protecting your online identity from the Internet:

1. Make your website anonymous

Digitizing your business while remaining anonymous is difficult but doable. Here are all the steps you need to take create an anonymous blog. Essentially:

• You need to come up with a web alias (a surname as we called it in the days when we used forums and never used our real names online)
• Set up a new email address and create new social media profiles that represent your business
• In addition, you will have to pay for domain privacy protection to prevent your phone, email and address from being associated with your domain. Domain privacy protection replaces personal information with proxy information in the WHOIS public directory.
• Make sure you are using an SSL certificate (by can do for free)

I know we talked transparency in authenticity and build your own personal brand too much, so creating a successful anonymous site without being exposed seems like an almost unpopular choice.

Well, I believe there is still room for anonymity on social media and you can still succeed at no cost to endangering your personal information to the public. You just have to be careful when using it all kinds marketing tactics – such as blogging and social media marketing – to make your private life – good – private.

Sure, that means we don’t post family pictures on Instagram and don’t tell personal stories, but there are still plenty of opportunities, from SEO to PPC ads. With more personal tactics like informing bloggers, you’ll probably have to come up with alternative identity since no one likes anonymous emails or emails coming from the company.

One thing should be noted here: it is feasible for both e-commerce and SaaS companies to create an anonymous business entity. Of course, some of your customers may be curious about who is behind your brand, but if you have working contact information, that’s not a big deal. This is of course more challenging for a stand-alone business than most stand-alone markets request your real name to join.

Some may argue about the possibility of anonymity in context EAT in fact, it is not generally known how exactly Google translates its EAT requirements into a sorting algorithm. So far, I’ve seen a lot of sites without humanized “Business Card” pages and ranked high. In addition, you can tell the story of your company without telling the personal story of its founder.

The need to become a public figure in order to be a successful business owner is overrated. It is still a matter of choice. Technical SEO in high quality backlinksas good as quality content and properly performed keyword research – three pillars of solid organic visibility remain. A well-designed Business Card page can exist without a personal brand if it conveys your company’s proposal, origin story, and values ​​that will resonate with your target consumers / audiences.

2. Delete your public content from third party platforms

It is likely that you have contributed to multiple third-party platforms with your real name. This is completely natural because there are some powerful social media players (like Facebook and Quora) who have established real name policies that prevent users from maintaining anonymity.

If at some point you decide you don’t want this content to appear in a search when someone searches for your name, what are your choices?

The hard truth is that removing your own content that you have added to a third party site is a challenge. Some platforms do not even have tools to massively delete content from the platform. In the case of Quora, you probably will delete your account to get rid of your content.

In some cases, such as Reddit and Tumblr, deleting your own account will not help either, as your content will remain assigned to the removed entity.

If you’re curious, here’s a breakthrough on major content-based third-party networks and how you can easily delete your content from them:

Content-based third party platform	Is there a way to delete content en masse?	Will the content disappear when you delete the entire account?
Reddit	no	no
Quora	no	Yes (except for questions that are mostly anonymous)
Instagram	Yes (You can also make your own private profile)
Twitter	no (But you can make them all private / protected)	Yes
Facebook	No (but you can make them all private / hidden)	Yes
Pinterest	no	Yes (but NOT re-pins that other people make out of your pins)
Tumblr	Yes (using mass post editor)	Not everyone (Your group blog contributions are kept)
Oh	no	Yes (But no immediately)
YouTube	Yes (You can delete your comments en masse and hide your videos en masse)	Yes

In summary, deleting your content from the web will require some work, and in some cases it won’t happen right away. However, it is better than saving future hours to try to block and delete unwanted communication directed against you and your business.

Of course, you can change your username on most of these networks to hide your real name, but keep in mind that your previous name will still be visible through the Wayback Machine and similar archiving tools if anyone takes the time to research.

3. Make your remaining accounts private

If you think networking is an extreme sport and you want to maintain some sort of social media presence to stay in touch with friends and family, simply make your accounts private. However, keep in mind that your name and profile picture may still be public and can be found through Google, even if your profile is set to private.

Here is an example of a private Instagram account that makes your name, username, description, profile picture, and website public, even for an unregistered viewer:

Generally, when a social media account is set to private, neither logged in nor unregistered people can access your content or your friends list.

The culture of spontaneous sharing is becoming too strong: people are publishing and sharing private data without consideration or without harm.

And let’s not forget forever possible breach of data the risk that your personal information may be obtained by hackers. It is clear from past incidents that the social media platform is unlikely to inform its users of the breach at all (they can do so, but months after it happened, months after your private data may have ended up in the wrong hands ).

Given this, deleting your accounts is probably a better – still not complete – option.

Conclusion

The truth is that as we begin to open our lives to the digital world, private content gets its wings. It is very difficult to get under control and spreads easily without even realizing it.

If this worries you, take at least a few steps now: When opening a new business or digitizing an existing one, keep your anonymity options in mind and make informed decisions about what you want your customers to know about your business. personal life.

---

Ann Smarty is the founder of Viral Content Bee, Head of Brands and Communities at Internet Marketing Ninjas. You can find her on Twitter @seosmarty.

Subscribe to Search Newsletter for insight into SEO, search landscape, search marketing, digital marketing, leadership, podcasts and more.

Join the conversation with us at LinkedIn in Twitter.