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.
Expat Internet Services
