Basically, you write yourself a check from your business account, or do a wire transfer from your business account (because of course you have a separate bank account for your business) to your personal account.

Ok, maybe you understood that was how you paid yourself, but you want to know about the accounting.  First thing to keep in mind is that this is not a salary expense, and you cannot deduct what you pay yourself as a business expenses.  Why is that?  Because the IRS sees the owner of a business paying himself as just a transfer of funds from one account (their business account) to another (their personal account).  Therefore, there is no expense.

In your accounting records, the equity accounts are the accounts that show how much money the owner would be able to take from the business if they were to sell off all their assets and pay off all the money owed to other businesses and people.  These equity accounts are increased by contributions by the owners and income from the business, and are reduced by owner withdraws and losses of the business.  When the owner wants to take money out of the business, it would be considered a “draw.”  What ends up happening is that not only does the business have less cash, but the amount the owner could withdraw in the future is reduced.

So does this mean that business owners get out of paying the taxes that the typical employee would pay?  Not by a long shot.  What happens is the business owner, if you are a sole proprietor or an LLC, reports all the income from their business on Schedule C of their tax return.  This income then rolls on to the business owner’s 1040 form, where the usual tax is calculated.

So how is this different than how it worked when you were an employee getting a W-2?  The business owner also has to pay self-employment taxes.  When you are completing your Schedule C, you will also complete form 1040-SE, which is used to calculate your self-employment taxes, which would be equivalent to the FICA taxes you see on your paycheck, which is for Social Security and Medicare taxes.

Additionally, when you are an employee and get a regular paycheck, taxes are taken out with every paycheck, so that when tax time rolls around, you aren’t hit with a big tax bill all at once.  When you are a business owner, unless you make quarterly payments, you will owe taxes on your entire year’s income when you file your return.

There are differences in how you get paid when you are a business owner verses as an employee.  Make sure you understand the differences between the ways before you write yourself a check.   Additionally, don’t be afraid to ask an accountant if you have questions about paying yourself.  I always enjoy helping my clients understand their tax situation, and I would rather have you ask what something means than have you make a decision based on information about which you are confused.  If you have questions, find a local accountant to give you a hand.  We love to help people with their taxes, and always invite questions.  You can also submit your questions in the comment section below, and I would be glad to answer them.

Chris Peden, CPA, CMA, CFM has over 15 years in the corporate world helping companies meet their regulatory compliance requirements.  He also assists small business owners with organizing and making sense of their finance information.  You can reach him at chrispedencpa@yahoo.com.  In accordance with Circular 230 Treasury Department Regulations, we are required to advise you that any tax advice contained in this article may not be relied upon to avoid penalties under the Internal Revenue Code.  If you are interested in a written opinion that can be relied upon to prevent the imposition of tax-related penalties, please contact the author.

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It’s crucial to consider the processes your company runs on to be temporary solutions — that you need to revisit them on a regular basis in order to ensure that you’re consistently doing everything right, even through changes in your company.

Outdated Business Processes: The Warning Signs

No standard procedure is enough to make every single day run smoothly: things will pop up that aren’t covered by your usual approach and parts of your process may suddenly stop working. But those situations should be relatively rare. How rare? There should definitely be more days that run smoothly than days that don’t. But beyond that, it can be difficult to be sure that the ratio is correct.

It’s really up to you to decide for your own business. If you feel like you’re able to keep your company moving forward — that you’re not struggling with day-to-day tasks — you probably don’t have too much to worry about. If you feel like everything constantly goes wrong and you can’t get any work done at all, the matter is equally simple. But, if you aren’t sure, the matter is more complicated.

The most practical way to decide if your business processes are really outdated is to start tracking when things don’t work perfectly. It’s a little extra work, which can be difficult to manage if you’re already feeling stressed. It’s necessary, though, and odds are that it’ll require less work than fully reworking your business processes unnecessarily. Keep the process simple: create a document that your whole team has access to and just add each incident as it comes along. Be sure to add a few details so that you know what’s going wrong, as well as a date, so you can calculate the frequency. As an added bonus, if you do have a list to work from, you’ll be able to tell quickly where there are holes in your processes.

Dealing with External Factors

There will be times when the tools you use to operate your business will change, suddenly putting you in the position where you need to update your business’ processes in a hurry. (See: Google Reader.) Other external factors can also force a change, putting you in the position where you need to figure out how to update everything quickly. Delaying even a few days may have consequences, depending on who is responsible for getting different types of work done in your company.

Keep an eye out for announcements of updates. Most of the companies that your rely on don’t want to suddenly change what they’re offering, if only to keep you and their other customers happy. If you can keep up to date, you may be able to modify your business’ processes far enough in advance that you can switch everything over immediately aver a new version is rolled out. That’s the ideal, at least.

For those cases where no advance warning is possible (like in a service outage) have a contingency plan in place. There’s not a way to plan for every single eventuality, unfortunately, but if you can at least make sure that any big problem won’t prevent you from meeting your own obligations, you’ll be better off. Try to think of everything that can go wrong; you won’t be able to guess every possibility until each one happens to you, but you can make some good guesses.

Create a Standing Appointment with Yourself

There’s no precise frequency with which you should re-evalute your business practices. If, after all, you’re looking at them too frequently, you’re not actually doing the work to grow your business. But if you ignore your processes for too long, the wheels may come off.

Having a regularly occurring point in the calendar (I use a yearly appointment) can force you to look at your processes regularly, hopefully before a problem can build. To the greatest point possible, you want to add suggestions from the people who are actually executing the processes you’ve cataloged: they may notice that there are little quirks in your systems that you would otherwise never hear about. You need feedback about both existing systems and your revisions, before they are implemented. It may not be out of the question to pull members of your team away from their regular work every once in a while to discuss the underlying systems.

If you’ve already created a way to log issues that pop up in the course of business — particularly those that recur with some frequency — you’ll be in a position to know if you need to speed up the frequency of your standing appointments. If too many problems pile up for you to easily address in a few hours of updating your processes, it’s probably best to go ahead and move up the date for your next scheduled revision.

The Process of Creating Process

It’s a bit meta, but you need a process for creating new processes for your company. As your business grows, it will become impossible for one person to decide how each procedure should be carried out. The only way to head off issues is to think about how you make your decisions and why. You may not be able to codify each step in your personal chain of thought, but you can provide your team with a general sense of the logic behind the choices you’ve made. With some work, you can help other people understand your priorities and, in turn, effectively handle projects the same way you would if you could work on every single task that needs to be completed in your office.

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Hold on there, buckaroo!  We need to chat for a couple of minutes.

First of all, I know very few small business owners who get to keep that schedule. Second, you don’t get to claim a home office deduction on your taxes just because you do work at your house.  There are a few requirements that you need to meet:

1. You need to use the area regularly and exclusively for your business.  This means you need to use it not just occasionally, but on a regular basis.  So you can’t set aside a section of the basement, use a few times a year, and call it an office.  Additionally, you must use the area exclusively for business and not for personal use.  So calling the living room your office isn’t going to cut it.  There are two exceptions to the exclusive use rule:  you use part of your home for storing inventory or product samples, or you use part of your home for a daycare facility.
2. Your house must be your principal place of business for your company.  Your home would qualify if (1) you use your home for administrative or management activities on an exclusive and regular basis, and (2)  you don’t have any other fixed location where you do a large amount of your business’s administrative or management activities.
3. You can claim a deduction for a home office if you meet with clients at your home, even if you also do business at another location.
4. If you have a free-standing structure at your house that your use regularly for your business, you can claim expenses for a home office.

Meet all those tests?  Great!  Now it is time to figure out what you can deduct.  There are two types of expenses, direct and indirect.  Direct expenses are deductible in full, and are expenses that are for the part of your home that encompasses the area you use for your business.  For example, if you painted your home office, the cost of the paint and supplies would be deductible.  Indirect expenses consist of expenses for the upkeep of your home.  This would include things like utilities, home owners insurance, and home repairs.  Indirect expenses are deductible based upon the percentage of your home which your home office occupies.  For example, if you paid $100 for home owner’s insurance, and your office encompasses 10% of your home, the deduction would be $10 (10% of $100).

Maybe you have heard that you can record some depreciation on your house as a business expense.  That is true.  What you would do is take the cost of your home, add in any improvements, and subtract any prior depreciation from a prior year.  You would take this amount and multiply it by the percentage of your home you used in your business times the percentage of the year you used your home office.  You would then take this amount and multiply it by a depreciation factor (called MACRS) you can get from the IRS literature.  Your accountant can help you with this.

While there is a lot to take in regarding the home office deduction, don’t let that stop you from considering taking the home office deduction.  Additionally, don’t be afraid to ask an accountant for guidance if you have questions about the home office deduction.  I always enjoy helping my clients understand their tax situation, and I would rather have you ask what something means than have you make a decision based on information about which you are confused.  If you have questions, find a local accountant to give you a hand.  We love to help people with their taxes, and always invite questions.  You can also submit your questions in the comment section below, and I would be glad to answer them.

Chris Peden, CPA, CMA, CFM has over 15 years in the corporate world helping companies meet their regulatory compliance requirements.  He also assists small business owners with organizing and making sense of their finance information.  You can reach him at chrispedencpa@yahoo.com.  In accordance with Circular 230 Treasury Department Regulations, we are required to advise you that any tax advice contained in this article may not be relied upon to avoid penalties under the Internal Revenue Code.  If you are interested in a written opinion that can be relied upon to prevent the imposition of tax-related penalties, please contact the author.

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Around the Entrepreneur Web

Here are some interesting links that may impact your small business week:

Are your customers and clients constantly confused by what you mean? Here’s how to boost your communications to clear the air.

Does bigger always equal better? When it comes to payments, it is!

Leadership skills are important for every entrepreneur, even if you’re just leading yourself! These 9 traits can help you become the business owner you’ve always wanted to be.

Small Business News That May Impact Your Week

We’ve heard a lot about the economy in the last few weeks, namely how it’s recovering and small businesses are flourishing. However, it’s one thing to talk about it and another to see it in action. Are you feeling the effects of the economy’s recovery yet?

In a recent CNN Money/Manta survey, the most pressing problem for small business owners polled was the economy. These owners report they have not felt the effects of the recovery and a majority say they will do no hiring this year. Business is too unstable for them and too many pennies are being pinched to get a good head start on their finances.

It’s not just the economy that’s worrying small business owners, though. Rising costs of owning a business are another huge factor as is intense regulations on their industry. They see a troubling trend of big businesses getting a break usually reserved for small businesses. Naturally the upcoming health care changes continue to be a point of contention with 38% polled saying the law would negatively impact their business.

What are you most worried about? Let’s hope in the near future you can put down “how to spend all my money” and “can’t figure out where to vacation” as your major woes.

Outright Community Speaks

Our users surprise us every day with questions and concerns. Here are some to think about this week:

Is there something about Outright that’s a little too confusing? Instead of reading about it – watch one of our helpful how-to videos!

A new feature has been added to exporting data – check it out!

A graphic designer needs help with costs of goods sold problems – can you help them out?

Have more questions or concerns? Stop by our Outright Customer Care forum!

Outright To-Do Tip: Take a Lunch

You’ve had the craziest morning and your afternoon looks like it’s just going to get that much crazier. You’ve got a thousand things to send off and another thousand things to write for your blog. Your phone is almost ready to give up the ghost due to how many messages are on it and suddenly you realize you forgot to eat today. It’s time to take a lunch!

Wait, really? How are you supposed to take a lunch with so much to do. We’re not sure, but you should figure it out. Taking a real break is crucial for your brain and stress levels. You may be thinking about work the whole time, and there’s not much you can do to stop that…but you should give it a shot. Your mind simply has to take a break from the constant “go go go” of running a business.

Even 30 minutes of relaxation can make a huge difference in your day. Don’t assume you’ll have time to relax after you finish every single thing – we all know that’s not the case as something else will pop up to distract you. Just bite the bullet and then bite your sandwich as you take a deep breath and try to recollect yourself.

That’s it for this week’s Small Business Forecast! Hope it’s a great and profitable one!

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1. Send out thank you cards.

It may seem a little old-fashioned, but sending out thank you cards can be surprisingly rewarding. Few of us expect to get hand-written mail these days, especially in connection with our businesses. So each thank you note will come as a pleasant surprise.

2. Offer your customers some support for your products or services.

It sounds simple but just sending out an email or making a phone call to ensure that your past sales are working out the way your customers expected can be enough to get you back in touch.

You do need to be prepared to hear about problems with what you’ve sold with this strategy. If a customer didn’t get the results she expected, she’s probably going to tell you about that fact. You may want to have a plan in place to resolve such questions before you start reaching out. It’s not a comfortable process, especially if you find more problems than you expected, but offering a little support to your past customers can be a simple way to restart communications.

3. Survey the customers you’ve worked with in the past.

Taking a more formal approach to reaching out can also make sense. By running a survey, you’ve not only got a clear reason why you need to reconnect with past customers, but you may be able to find some great opportunities to build on that connection: you may find that there’s a particular follow up product or a piece of support that would make your customers more likely to place additional orders.

4. Create a newsletter or other content just for your past customers.

Just as you market your business to new prospects by publishing a newsletter or other online content, you can create targeted information that will reward your customers for buying through you. If you know your customer base well enough, creating a regular newsletter or other regularly scheduled content may require far less time than marketing to entirely new prospects.

Creating less regularly scheduled content is also an option: ebooks, white papers and other materials directed specifically at your existing clientele can help show them that you’re willing to keep giving them value even if they haven’t made a recent purchase.

5. Ask to create a case study.

Marketing to new prospects can do double duty in helping you reconnect with past customers. Because case studies and other proof of how you’ve helped your existing customer base are some of the most effective marketing methods, it’s important to create a steady supply of such materials.

Creating a regular schedule of contacting past customers and interviewing them for case studies is a simple enough process. It also can be useful for your customer to get a little press and may even remind her of why she was excited to buy from you in the first place.

6. Connect on social media.

Sometimes just having more communication channels can help you stay in contact more effectively. Making a point of connecting with your customers through appropriate social media channels (like LinkedIn) can be a simple approach to reconnecting. Because such sites let you see what your customers are up to, you can start conversations with them beyond pitching them a new product. Building a broader relationship can only help you with future sales efforts.

7. Develop a series of special offers for customers who work with you on a regular basis.

Providing an incentive to keep coming back to you will minimize the risk that your past customers will consider trying a new vendor. It can be cost effective to give your loyal customers a little bit of a a break, because you’ll be able to avoid the cost of acquiring new customers.

You may need some extra information to make your promotions effective, so this particular option works best in tandem with creating a survey for your past customers. That way you can make sure that you’re offering exactly what they’re willing to buy.

8. Create a product or service just for customers who have purchased from you in the past.

If you sell a product or service that is clearly a one-time purchase or once-in-a-while purchase, it can be hard to line up repeat business. If, for instance, you create a new website design for a business owner, she’s not going to want to put together an entirely new site for her company a week later. But you can find other products to offer, like SEO help to get that new website ranking well.

You may not always be able to produce an entirely new thing to sell to your customers, but you don’t always have to, either. You may be able to partner with another company to offer a relevant service to your past customers. That, in turn, can help you build a more long-term relationship with your clients so you can stay connected in the intervals between their purchases.

9. Celebrate big events and invite your customers.

Every company has milestones and it’s worth telling your customers about what they’ve helped you achieve. Going a little bigger and celebrating those milestones gives you an opportunity to do something with multiple customers at once: whether you throw a party for a company anniversary or just send out an announcement mentioning who your early adopters were, you can use milestones as more than just a way to keep score.

10. Create a standard process for staying in touch.

No matter which methods work best in your niche for staying connected with your past customers, doing so shouldn’t be a once-in-a-while process — it needs to be something you’re doing every day as a standard part of your work day. Create a process that you can easily follow, even if it is as basic as sending out one email a day to an old connection. Regularly investing time in maintaining your connections is the only way to keep them active.

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If you’re like most entrepreneurs, freelancers, or contractors, writing probably isn’t your specialty. Your trade is your specialty. But these days, you’ve got to write to keep up. Nearly every business has a blog. Visitors expect to see them and, when done well, they can glean a lot of value from them. Blogs help keep old customers up to date and to entice visitors to become new customers.

But you probably know all this by now. You’re blog is probably all set up and ready to go. The only thing it’s lacking is posts, right? Maybe you’ve written a couple of posts about your products or maybe you’ve written about your company a few times. Now you’re probably asking yourself, what else is there to write about?

While it may not seem like it now, no matter what business you’re in, the writing topics are truly endless.

Checklist for Blog Post Ideas

As a blogger, I spend a lot of time brainstorming ideas. I’ve put together a checklist I can use when I need a fresh idea and today I am going to share it with you. So many posts can grow out of just one of these, you should have enough ideas to last you all year. Happy writing!

1. Outline new versus old ways of doing business. This might include how businesses like yours were run before computers.
2. Write about the history of your field.
3. Compare your industry with another that is totally unrelated.
4. Write about industry news.
5. Check Digg, StumbleUpon, or Technorati for popular topics and add a new angle to it.
6. Promote clients and highlight success stories.
7. Critique ideas featured by industry leaders.
8. Dispel some common myths about your industry.
9. Highlight characteristics of successful leaders in your industry.
10. Explain how your company solves common customer problems.

As your small business grows, you’ll have to find freelancers and per-project contractors to take on everything from email campaigns to customer relations.

You may already know about freelancer websites like Elance.com and Odesk.com, which are places where SMBs can go to scope out top – and not so top – freelancer talent.

Speaking of “not so top,” how are you supposed to know if a freelancer is good to work with and worth the investment?

Here are 5 easy ways to find freelancers that will not just deliver, but exceed your expectations every time.

1. Examine their profile

Elance and Odesk allow freelancers to create customer profiles that showcase their talents. You can tell a lot about a freelancer by the materials they choose to highlight, the skills they list, and even the profile picture they choose to share!

If you’re trying to hire a copywriter, for example, and their profile isn’t well-written, it may be time to move on to your other choices.

2. Evaluate their proposal

A lot of freelancers copy and paste proposals and mass submit to online jobs. Do yourself a favor and delete them! If they can’t take the time to create a unique proposal, how much effort are they really going to put into your project?

Double bonus points for contractors who can give you a sense of their personality and working style from just their proposal alone. A solid, compelling proposal marks the difference between an amateur and a professional.

3. Put them to the test

Once you find freelancers, it’s time to whip out your credit card, right? Not so fast!

Round up your top three people and give them a small, paid assignment. If you’re hiring someone to design your website, you could assign a single page mock up to a group of three awesome designers. From there, you can see whose work you like best!

4. Observe their follow up

Notice how the freelancer interacts with you during the “audition” process – it’s a great indicator of how they’ll act once you’re actually working together.

Are they ready and willing to create a test design for you, or are you sensing a bit of ‘tude?

Do they respond to emails promptly or are you left waiting for days?

No matter how awesome their work is, finding someone who is great to work with is just as valuable.

5. Check their follow-through

How does your freelancer respond once you’ve awarded them the job (or not)?

If you’re looking to build a longterm relationship with your freelancer, you may want to pass on their initial proposal, just to check their follow-through.

Are they respectful and pleasant, or do they leave the conversation in a huff?

Smart freelancers know that careers are built on long term relationships, not on one-off projects. They’re also secure enough to know that they’re not right for every project, regardless of their talent.

Once you’ve gotten to know your freelancer through this process, you’ll have a much stronger sense of what they’ll be like to work with, how they handle challenges, and how they handle criticism.

What traits do you look for in a potential freelancer for your business?

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1. Seek professional guidance.

Sure, you can always plug “examples of business plans” into Google, but having an experienced friend or mentor who can actually walk you through the business plan process that he/she made will help you much more. Professionals can also help show you the ropes; the dos and don’ts that they picked up along the way from their own personal experiences. People love to talk about their own journeys so ask lots of questions, take plenty of notes, and learn from them so you can make fewer mistakes on your own.

2. Download a template.

Business plans aren’t just for your eyes only. Potential investors or partners will also want to take a look at what you’ve got planned. Put your best foot forward with a neat and professional business plan template – you can download one online with template sites like SCORE.org – and edit the plan to suit your business’ needs.

3. Getting started.

First off, include all of the basics about your business idea: the name of your business, how you plan to start up, a list of competitors, a breakdown of finances (how much you’ll need to open) and potential marketing ideas. This is enough to get you going on the details that will need to be included in your plan. As you write all this information up, additional details may come to you that you feel you ought to include, so write those down as you go!

4. Go section by section.

A business plan should be extensive and cover a lot of information related to the future of the business. Most business plans include the following sections: an executive summary of your concept, information about your products or services, marketing plans, a management profile and general financial information. This can seem overwhelming when it comes time to get started, but if you break it down by the sections mentioned, the process will seem a lot easier. Doing a section a day is a good pace.

5. Pay special attention to finances.

Be thorough and accurate when figuring out your financial information. Finances are something you can’t have too much wiggle room for, and it’s a section that potential investors and partners will particularly pay attention to.

6. Be clear.

In your writing, be sure to keep things clear and to the point. A lot of information is good; a lot of flowery adjectives are not. Remember to stay professional even in your writing style.

7. Edit and review.

Once you have written the best business plan you can, ask your friends, professional colleagues, mentors, and family to take a look and give you their opinion. Encourage them to ask you questions about your business and on anything at all that is not clear or easily understood.  An outside perspective is often key to giving the business plan just what it needs or may be missing and getting an “eagle eye” is always a good thing!

Author Bio:

Deborah Sweeney is the CEO of MyCorporation.com. MyCorporation is a leader in online legal filing services for entrepreneurs and businesses, providing start-up bundles that include corporation and LLC formation, registered agent, DBA, and trademark & copyright filing services. MyCorporation does all the work, making the business formation and maintenance quick and painless, so business owners can focus on what they do best. Follow her on Google+ and on Twitter @deborahsweeney and @mycorporation.

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Outright To-Do Tip: Get Your Week in Control

What’s on your agenda this week? Many business owners have issues with organization, even if their tasks are similar every week. But no matter how much you fight it, getting your business life in order makes you much more productive.

Next week, try getting everything in order early Monday or really late Sunday to try and get a jump on things. Even if you’re used to doing the same thing week in and week out, take a little extra time to get it all organized. You may be in for a surprised when you realize you can fit way more in if you move some activities around.

Don’t just stick to your usual routine, either – give something wild and crazy a shot. If you always start your days sending emails and checking the news, move it to later in the day so you can hit the post office in the mornings. Doing this means you miss the lunch rush and have an hour to make more product or interact with some customers on social media.

The important thing is to try some new organizational and scheduling methods. While not everybody thrives in this environment it can give you a new perspective on how you do business.

Around the Entrepreneur Web

Here are some interesting links that may impact your small business week:

In the market for a new bank? Here are some tips to help you decide who to go with.

Chargebacks may drive you crazy, but you have to consider them from the viewpoint of your customers and clients.

Want to know more about Bitcoins? This Entrepreneur Magazine article gives you the skinny and shows you how some are taking advantage.

Small Business News That May Impact Your Week

Well, it seems that the Internet sales tax debate isn’t going away anytime soon. The Marketplace Fairness Act passed the Senate last week and has a chance of passing the House soon. If that happens, the Obama administration has indicate they support the Act so it most likely will become law.

What will this mean for your business? Currently 45 states collect sales tax. If you’re an online seller who makes over $1 million outside of states where you have physical operations then you’ll have to start collecting sales tax.

Ok, it might not really affect most readers of this blog. However, many are worried this will start to trickle down to the small businesses out there that rely on online sales. It could severely cut into profits either by lowering the amount of sales or even the number of customers altogether.

While nothing’s finalized yet, there could be lots of news about this coming up. Stay tuned this week!

Outright Community Speaks

Our users surprise us every day with questions and concerns. Here are some to think about this week:

Some users report they still are having trouble with the eBay App unable to access “Other Actions” in IE9. Here’s a workaround!

Know a way Outright can work better for you? Submit it to our Feature Requests and we’ll take a look!

Have more questions or concerns? Stop by our Outright Customer Care forum!

That’s it for this week’s Small Business Forecast! Hope it’s a great and profitable one!

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However, you may also garner the attention of competitors, who can hide behind the anonymity provided by the internet in order to attack you directly (by posting negative reviews) or indirectly (say by creating linking schemes that point to your website). Luckily, there are ways that you can work to protect your online reputation.

First and foremost, you need to be aware of your own reputation in the online arena, which means monitoring industry blogs and forums, using analytical tools to find mentions, and even running a Google search on your company name and related search terms every so often in order to gauge what consumers are finding when they look for you. If you discover, at some point, that your reputation has somehow shifted into the realm of the negative, and that’s the first information that consumers are encountering, there are things you can do turn it around.

You’ll want to start at home, and this means addressing your website, blog, and social media profiles. These platforms are tools that allow you interact with consumers in a positive way, which is great for your reputation only if you use them accordingly. Ignoring them is not an option. By providing content that is engaging and updating it frequently you have the ability not only to keep your followers and patrons interested, but you can also optimize in order to supplant any negative information that may have surfaced. Over time, with persistence and targeted efforts, your content will bury any negative press.

Your first inclination may be to attack those who have come after you, but in general this is not a good policy. For one thing, you’re running a business; you don’t have time to track down every Tom, Dick, and competitor that decides to post a bad review. Whether they’re justified or not, you can’t hope to address every complaint online. What you can do is make sure to reply in a timely manner to consumers that reach out to you, providing them with the help they require. This will hopefully put the kibosh on new complaints and publicly-aired grievances. And you can, of course, contact site administrators to request that libelous information is removed, or that you are allowed to post a reply correcting any erroneous information.

And as a last resort you can always seek out online reputation management services. These professionals will cost you, but they are capable of monitoring your online reputation, addressing concerns, and helping you to create the positive image you want to present. If you find yourself suffering from a negative online reputation and no amount of effort seems to turn things around, hiring professional help could be the best (or only) option remaining.

Leon Harris is a contributing writer for Reputation.com. Harris lives in Southern California, and enjoys eating healthy and exercising with his two Golden Retrievers.

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