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.

I just want to extend my congratulations to GaleriAd with the launch of their new website!

GaleriAd is using a hosting package from Expat Internet Services and has built a Flash-powered site to promote their “integral consumer connection” services for clients in Peru and Latin America.

GaleriAd’s mission (the “unofficial” translation from Spanish) reads:

GaleriAd is an independent agency and creative leader that creates strong and provocative emotional connections between good companies and their consumers. Using ideas that are relevant, inspirational and disruptive

Their website offers information about their vision, values, who works there and their methodology they have entitled “Connector Tool”.

US President Barack Obama gained (and maintains) a huge number of “followers” through his dedication to the ideas of communication, transparency and participation throughout his political campaign in 2007-2008.

In fact, his media team is looking continue the practice of being directly engaged with the people who support his ideas and have a vested interest in seeing the impact of President Obama’s decisions. The objectives of engaging with citizens and keeping them informed through something more than a press conference has a parallel lesson for anyone who is building an online identity, especially a global identity.

Communication

When you establish a blog, an e-newsletter, an online forum or a website with all of this things you are looking to communicate more effectively with your clients or readership. There are increasing opportunities to use video and audio content as part of your communications tool kit as well. YouTube, Vimeo, Metacafe and Viddler, just to name a few.

If you are looking to use video on your website or blog, you can create accounts on the services mentioned above then embed links or small video players on your website. Many blogging services allow you to embed these links and make it easy for you to share video content you have created and stored elsewhere on the Internet.

Transparency

If you have a business or operate as an independent professional (e.g., freelancer, consultant or advisor), your reputation and the value of your services is a key to maintaining and growing your client base. Building a reputation takes time and, for a business, is founded on the feedback of clients. How can you make potential customers aware of the value of your services? Having a means to publish and comment on the feedback from existing clients and colleagues.

Success in a business, especially for global professionals, increasingly relies upon partnering with other organizations. Your online identity can be an online record of your work and enable potential partners to find you and understand how your expertise can help them be successful too.

If you are an established professional and are looking to increase your reputation and presence in your field, having an online identity is an increasingly valuable tool to differentiate your work and achievements. When you set up a blog or professional profile site (essentially an online resume and portfolio), you make it easier for potential employers and colleagues to find you and understand what you can offer an organization.

Participation

Simply pushing information out to a mailing list doesn’t enable people to give feedback or truly engage with you or your organization. While it might seem like a chaos-inducing idea to make easy for visitors to your website to suggest services or propose ways to make your organization more useful, that is exactly what can make your online presence stand out.

Forums and sites with interactive tools (Facebook, InterNations, Google Groups, Yahoo! Groups, Ning, PBWiki and others) can make it easy for people with specific interests to gather together and comment on services (being provided or ones that are needed) and find people who can help. There are plenty of “solutions” represented on the Internet, the goal is to create the opportunities to connect the people who need products and services with those who can deliver them. If your website can make this process easier for people you are interacting with, then you create not only an advantage for yourself but can help others as well.

More perspective

If you want to read more about what people are thinking of how the US President will use the internet there is a related blog post at O’Reilly Radar.

Tools to create your own global identity

if you are looking to get a “quick start” to developing your online identity, you might consider using the Quick Blogcast service to begin creating and publishing content immediately. This service also has the option of using your own domain name to build more awareness in search engines and other blogs.

If you are looking to establish a clear name for your organization, business or simply for a personal (professional or social) website, having your own domain name is an important first step. And, finally, if you are setting up an online community – either large or small – you can use a variety of open source tools that integrate into your website.

Domain names for local and international identity

You might be wondering how registering a domain name could help you or your organization establish itself on the Internet. More specifically, you might be considering if it is worth the time to go through the whole process.

The good news is that the “whole process” is actually quite simple. The better news is that having your own domain is rather like owning your own home versus renting – without all of the maintenance hassles! Domain names enable a person or an organization to establish a unique identity. This new identity can be a local one or a global identity. There can be a clever play on words or a simple statement that captures the essence of who you are or what you are doing on the internet and in the world.

If you are involved in international activities or have a portable career, establishing a more consistent global identity is more than desirable – it is essential. The people you interact with will want to know how to contact you or be involved with your organization. Establishing your presence on the internet makes it easier for people to get in touch and stay up to date on the latest news and events in your part of the world.

Being known internationally is a fact of life

Consider that the huge variety of expatriate internet sites all offer you a unique set of information about a given location (or a whole set of locations). Each site wants to provide you with specialized information and draw you to their site. As an individual or organization, this makes sense for you too.

The unique information you can offer might be a collection of professional achievements (e.g., professional articles, graphic designs, fiction and non-fiction literary works). Your global identity may be best characterized through a series of events spread across several years time and multiple locations. These types of information can be quickly and simply communicated through a online presence characterized by a descriptive domain name.

You may be affiliated with an organization or business that has partners in multiple locations. It is increasingly a business standard to have contacts throughout the world. In some cases, your organization might be targeting multiple, international locations in order to improve their market opportunities or reach a specific group of people. All of these cases underscore the importance of creating a global identity that you can develop into a platform for your operational needs.

Expat Internet Services is dedicated to making it easy for individuals and organizations to create and maintain websites from anywhere in the world.

The global reach of the Internet is often an important tool for expatriates living and working overseas. While away from home and interacting with friends and colleagues, a website is a lifeline for communication and collaboration. The variety of products available through Expat Internet Services simplify the process of setting up a new website, registering domain names, creating online media (such as blogs, podcasts and photo albums) and maintaining a global presence for an individual or an organization.