Expat Internet Services

When you spend time developing your career or personal passion, you often want to promote them effectively. There are variety of ways to establish your personal brand for your professional activities or your personal interests. you can find numerous articles about Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and how you can use them to create, and maintain, your online identity. There are even services that help you to consolidate your social personas and manage them from a central site – some examples include Chi.mp, Ping.fm and Card.ly.

Relying on other sites

When you rely upon other sites, like the ones above, you are usually confident that they will be around for a long time. However, if you are looking to create an identity that travels with you and can be crafted to reflect your experiences or professional achievements, creating your own web presence becomes a necessity. Spend some time creating and developing a website and you definitely appreciate the investment of your time and effort — but it doesn’t have to be costly in terms of monetary expense.

Create to fit your needs

Start out with a basic solution (e.g., shared hosting rather than dedicated hosting) and expand your site as needed. Consider using website building tools (e.g., WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla) that don’t require a commercial license. And you can use stock photos or your images (from Flickr) to add color and pictures to your site.

Your website (either a blog, photo journal or pages on social networks) makes it easier for people to find you and then begin to rely on you for advice, ideas and, possibly, partnership or professional collaboration. Depending on what you want to achieve you can use different types of websites -

• Web blog (or blog) – create a blog for a specific project or trip and then connect it to other blogs each with their own identity
• Portfolio website – a good way to showcase photos, projects or writing samples (white papers, brochures, creative writing, etc.)
• Professional Services – promote your expertise and increase visibility on search engines by adding content on a regular schedule
• E-Commerce stores – sell products (either manufactured or information) through a dedicated portal with secure transactions
• Affiliate sites or blogs – promote other people’s products and services by creating a blog or website that highlights the benefits of the products
• Learning Online / Teaching – use a content management system or a learning management system to deliver training course for as a public service or for profit
• Single page – sales letters, mini-sites, article directories, audio and video podcast websites can attract visitors in specific niches and offer highly specialized content for search engines

Find what you need to get started

The links above can connect you with the sites where you can download the content creation tools you need to set up a website. These tools are also available as part of the hosting accounts offered at Expat Internet Services. There are well established communities that support tools such as WordPress, Drupal and Joomla (and other tools) where you can find free add-ons (plugins and modules) to add audio, video and image galleries to your website.

No matter how hard you have worked on creating an online presence through your personal or professional website, you will need to plan on spending time to make it “searchable” and “findable” for major search engines. A post over at the Globalpreneur points out these key concepts as SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing).

The post mentions “choosing words, content, and design. . . to meet the needs of search engines” – this translates into having a well-organized website that has a clear hierarchy (e.g., home page, other main pages, sub-pages) with links that can be followed by the search engines. There are a few ways to achieve a search engine-friendly structure for your site:

• Small content = fewer pages: if your site is concise and can express all of your key messages in just a few pages, you can have a very simple website structure that is easy to follow and index
• Rely on a content management system: when you have more content, it needs to be organized logically and a content management tool (such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, just a name a few) can help you build the structure and maintain your content with less emphasis on coding and more on writing.

Search engines want to find new and changing content. When you take the time to create a website, you should expect to invest some time each week into maintaining and expanding your online identity. When you consistently update your site’s content, search engines will create new index connections and make it easier for other internet users to find your site and link to your content.

When you supplement the standard search engine results with search engine marketing, you can draw attention to specialized content on your site or highlight new services and products. Google AdWords is a popular example of search engine marketing. You can spend some time and learn about how to use AdWords at the Google AdWords Learning Center. If you are just getting started, the online training can provide some practical background and explanations about online advertising and website promotion.

Good luck and don’t forget about other major search engines and the importance of looking at more localized resources and multi-lingual tools. You can find examples of international search engines with local language versions in the Wikipedia article on search engine marketing.

There was an excellent article recently published about the 18 rules the best web developers follow and it highlighted an important idea for people who live and work internationally. Two of the rules struck me as particularly relevant to the idea of expat internet sites.

3. Be a source of information. Virtually everyone on the web is looking for specific information. Whether it is for a product, service, or just educational, sharing your expertise and experiences sets your website apart from the others and adds value to the content.

Your website can be a means to share advice, demonstrate your expertise, a way to promote a cause or organizatio or the starting point in a sales process. Regardless of what your ultimate goal is, you need to think about why people will want to visit your site and stay there once they have found it. If you are thinking about offering information that applies to more than one country or region, you have the added “adventure” of thinking about the different cultures of your audiences.

14. Take advantage of the “worldwide” web. The world is a big place and more and more people are coming to the web. Don’t be afraid to expand your web presence beyond your local niche or country. As long as the information you are providing is useful, the visitors will come to learn more, regardless of where they are. Ideas transcend borders.

if you have experience living and working internationally you already have an advantage when putting your website together. You can draw upon your own “lessons learned” and add the benefit of your foreign-but-local perspective to the topics you address on your site. When connecting with more than one culture, you can also draw upon the variety of popular icons or prominent themes from the cultures to make your messages more relevant.