The phrase 'hard earned reputation' is correct and can be used in written English.
It is often used to mean that someone has worked hard to establish a good reputation for themselves. For example: After many years of hard work, he had earned a hard-earned reputation for excellence in his field.
BBC director of news and current affairs James Harding said: "The editorship of Panorama is one of the most exciting and challenging jobs at the BBC and I am confident that Ceri will raise to new heights the programme's hard earned reputation for investigative journalism.
Actions that were once accepted as an externality are now treated as something punishable with monetary fines and sometimes irreversible damage to a firm's hard earned reputation.
Our father was a principled judge who developed a hard earned reputation for being just and his frame of reference was Islam.
Maintaining hard earned good reputation and personal integrity is rewarding and beats starting over from a deficit; but, if you find yourself in a rut -- stop digging -- and climb out of the deepest "mud-hole" onto a firmer footing!
If No Country for Old Men hadn't been so brilliant, and if the Coen brothers didn't in any case have such a hard-won and thoroughly earned reputation as distinctive and intelligent film-makers, this wouldn't have felt like such a letdown.
Long before it was made open source, the platform had a well earned reputation for being hard to program.
By the time they get divorced, they've already earned reputations as hard workers.
The two have moved easily within Manhattan's overwhelmingly liberal upper crust and have earned reputations as hard-working and willing to listen to others.
Moreover, this fragmentation is reinforced every day, making it hard for scientists to publish work that falls between the "disciplinary" cracks, and to earn reputations for taking the bigger challenge.
If anyone has earned the right to sit back and enjoy the spoils of a hard-earned reputation, it's Attenborough.
Today it can make or break a company's hard-earned reputation.
