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.

When you have multiple electronic products (books, music, video, audio) and you are already sending news about them to clients or subscribers (such as newsletter subscribers) have you considered setting up a unique domain for the products? Does this even make sense?

With the increase in electronic products and services delivered in digital format or online, it can be a challenge to make new products stand out. In order to improve the visibility of a digital product, such as an ebook or special report consider setting up a keyword-specific domain name. A few examples of such specific domain names include:

• masterbusinessblogging.com – Business Blog Mastery with Denise Wakeman of The Blog Squad
• breakthroughemailmarketingsecrets.com – A product offered by Bob Bly (bly.com)
• findyourniche.co.nz – Recruitment specialists research, consumer insights and analytics

If you are looking at creating information products or are delivering services via the internet, you might consider setting up a separate website (or sites) to better differentiate your products and also, as a secondary benefit, create additional links between your primary website and your product or service-specific site.