In business, the extent to which you can earn customers’ trust in your brand determines whether you succeed or fail in marketing your products and services. This is true in traditional marketing. The principle is the same if you’re growing a business online. Your reputation is very important, and you’ll want to have diverse ideas to boost your online image. Here are some.

Earn customer’s trust and respect. These two elements are key to growing business relationships. They are not easy to attain. Skillful management of online an image (or a public image) will surely help, but it is not enough — as Tiger Woods must have realized by now. Trust and respect are the products of showing your target audiences that you are fair in your dealings, resolute in your commitments and constantly behave with integrity. You’re in here for the long haul, so make sure you invest in goodwill.

Show respect. If someone criticizes you or any aspect of your business on your website, be careful in how you respond. Never direct your response against the person of your critic. Rather, make sure to answer substantively the points (criticisms) he or she has raised. You may even decide not to respond at all to the criticism, but when you do, take care not to damage your online image through a careless remark.

Gather testimonials. It is helpful to have customers vouch for you through testimonials and good reviews. The more credible is the person giving the testimonial, the weightier the comments. Reviews from customers of business to business sales will be most helpful, because people know a business firm is more stringent in its performance criteria. But stay away from fake testimonials: remember, people can identify a fake quite easily. Having fakes on your site can tarnish your online image instead of enhancing it.

Monitor your online image. Make sure you are able to monitor your account, at least on a daily basis. Events happen very fast on the Web and your online image can suffer very quickly. This is going to consume a lot of time. Team collaboration will be more effective in this task, so that more people are involved in monitoring comments. The employees should be trained in the best ways to handle issues that may arise. You may even pick up ideas to boost your online image or for fine-tuning your business to business sales program.

In this connection, you will have to make sure that the management of your online presence is assigned to someone who has detailed knowledge of the company and a significant stake in seeing to its success.

Focus on positive things. You can expect to receive a good number of negative comments about you or your company. It is very tempting to overstate how negative some statements are — especially when you care so much about your online image and that of your business. Learn to downplay such negative comments and highlight instead the positive comments that do come in with them. If you think some comments are already libelous or defamatory, reserve your judgment until a lawyer advises you to pursue legal action. And if you do file a lawsuit, keep quiet about it and avoid posting threats on your site. Your online image will only suffer.

The fundamental idea in all this is to develop the trust and respect of your customers. Get your audience involved in what you’re doing online. Encourage them to start conversations with you — or start some with them.