How to safeguard your privacy while building your digital business

The internet is both, a boon and a bane, depending on – how you use it, and how others use it to interact with you. A lot of new businesses and side hustles emerged post the pandemic, while brick and mortar businesses started digitizing themselves. This has raised well-being challenges virtually how merchantry owners and senior executives can separate work from their personal pockets over the internet. How can they ensure their privacy and online safety are strong while towers a digital merchantry footprint?

Here are a few things you should know well-nigh safeguarding your online identity from the internet:

1. Making your site anonymous

Digitizing your merchantry while remaining unrecognized is difficult but doable. Here are all the steps you need to take to create an anonymous blog. In essence:

• You need to come up with an online pseudonym (a moniker as we used to undeniability it when in the days when we were using forums and never used our real names virtually the web)
• Set up a new email write and create your new public social media profiles representing your business
• In addition, you will need to pay for domain privacy protection to prevent your phone, email, and write from stuff tied to your domain. Domain privacy protection replaces personal information with proxy info in the public WHOIS directory.
• Make sure you are using an SSL document (which you can do for free)

I know we have been talking well-nigh transparency and authenticity and towers your personal brand too much, so creating a successful unrecognized site without exposing yourself seems scrutinizingly like an unpopular choice.

Well, I believe theres still a place for anonymity in social media, and you can still succeed without the forfeit of compromising your personal details to the public. You just need to take shielding steps when using all kinds of marketing tactics – like blogging and social media marketing – in order to alimony your private life – well – private.

Of course, that means, not posting family pictures on Instagram, and not telling personal stories, but there is still a wealth of opportunities, from SEO to PPC ads. With increasingly personal tactics, like blogger outreach, you will likely have to come up with an alternative identity as no one likes unrecognized emails or emails coming from a business.

Theres one thing to note here: For both ecommerce and SaaS businesses creating an unrecognized merchantry entity is doable. Of course, some of your customers may be curious who is overdue your trademark but if you have working contact information, it is not a huge issue. It is, of course, increasingly challenging for a freelancing business, as most freelance marketplaces require your real name in order to join.

Some may oppose well-nigh the possibility of anonymity in the context of E-A-T but in reality, it isn’t worldwide knowledge how exactly Google translates its E-A-T requirements into a ranking algorithm. So far, I’ve seen plenty of websites with no humanized ‘About’ pages ranking, and ranking high. Besides, you can tell the story of your merchantry without telling the personal story of its founder. 

The need to wilt a public persona in order to be a successful merchantry owner is overrated. It is still a matter of choice. Technical SEO and high-quality backlinks, as well as the quality of content and properly performed keyword research – remain the three pillars of solid organic visibility. A well-done ‘About’ page can exist without personal branding as long as it conveys your business’ proposition, origin story, and conveys values that will resonate with your target consumers/audience.

2. Delete your public content from third-party platforms

Chances are, you have been contributing to several third-party platforms using your real name. It is only natural considering there are a few powerful social media players (like Facebook and Quora) that have real-name policies in place preventing users from maintaining anonymity.

If at some point you decide that you dont want that content to come up in search when anyone is searching for your name, what are your choices?

The nonflexible truth s that removing your own content that you widow to a third-party site is a challenge. Some platforms dont plane have tools for mass-deleting content from the platform. In the specimen of Quora, you will probably need to delete your own worth in order to get rid of your content.

In some cases, like Reddit and Tumblr, plane deleting your own worth wont help as your content will remain there prescribed to a removed entity.

In specimen you are curious, heres a break-through of major third-party content-based networks and how you can wipe your content off them in an easier way:

In summary, deleting your content from the web will take some work, and in some cases, it will not happen instantly. But it is largest than saving future hours trying to woodcut and delete spam communications targeted toward you and your business.

You can, of course, transpiration your username on most of these networks to hibernate your real name but mind that your previous name will be still visible through the Wayback Machine and similar archiving tools, should anyone take the time to research.

3. Make your remaining finance private

If you think going off the grid is an lattermost sport and want to maintain some sort of social media presence to stay in touch with friends and family, simply make your finance private. But remember that your name and profile picture may still be public and findable through Google, plane when a profile is set to private.

Heres an example of a private worth on Instagram which still makes your name, username, description, profile picture, and website public, plane for a non-logged-in viewer:

Generally, when a social media worth is set to private, neither logged-in nor unregistered people cannot wangle your content or your friend list.

The culture of spontaneous sharing is going too strong: People publish and share private information without much consideration or without meaning any harm.

And let’s not forget well-nigh an unchangingly possible data breach risk that can land your personal information in the possession of hackers. From the past incidents, it is quite well-spoken a social media platform is unlikely to plane let their users know well-nigh the violate (they may do that but months without it happened, months without your private data may have ended up in the wrong hands).

That stuff said, deleting your finance is probably a largest – still not a perfect – option.

Conclusion

The truth is, once we start opening up our lives to the digital world, that private content gets wings of its own. It becomes very difficult to bring it under tenancy and can hands spread without you plane stuff aware.

If this is something of a snooping to you, take at least some steps now: When starting a new merchantry or digitizing your current one, alimony your anonymity options in mind and make an informed visualization as to what you want your customers to know well-nigh your personal life.

Ann Smarty is the Founder of Viral Content Bee, Trademark and Community manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas. She can be found on Twitter @seosmarty.

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