Personal Visibility – The Power of You!

Notwithstanding the fact that you may already have profiles and interactions on a number of different sites, lets focus on establishing a meaningful baseline that can best facilitate the promotion of your personal brand–a stake in the ground in other words.

It seems the most efficient place to do this is with one of the current internet pillars–LinkedIn. Yes, LinkedIn. Format, ease-of-use, visibility, number of users, overall connectivity, a ubiquitous presence and maybe the most important reason–the internal and external search features allowing people to find you. Find you for networking purposes, a career opportunity or a whole host of reasons that might be advantageous and to your benefit…particularly your career path. Personal visibility is key here and to earlier comments, with this kind of elevated visibility, your profile and picture shouldn’t be the equivalent of getting caught in that old t-shirt and sweat pants that you occasionally lay around the house in! Spend the time, fine tune your profile and understand that putting your best image on LinkedIn is work-in-progress and will likely require several edits before you’re reasonably comfortable with your page. It’s OK to search “best linkedin profiles” and “best linkedin summaries” to get an idea about your verbiage. There are video tutorials and lots of “how to” advice. Use every resource available to you and invest the time to do it right, even if it takes you several weeks. Before you know it your LinkedIn profile will begin to take shape and whether you’re a stay-at-home-mom or Fortune 50 CEO, you will find with a little effort that you can tell a very compelling story on LinkedIn about who you are–a framework for your personal brand.

Speaking of stakes in the ground, do you own your name as a dot com (ex. johndoe.com)? Do you own your kiddos names? If not, you should and  the sooner you do so the greater the likelihood those names will be available. It’s simple–download the free GoDaddy app on your smart phone or tablet and then type your name into the search bar. If it’s available, buy it–period. If your given name is not available, find a variation that’s satisfactory to you and own that instead (ex. jdoe.com or jbdoe.com). As a matter of practical advice there are always specials available for GoGaddy if you google “GoDaddy specials” before you purchase. Even without the specials available to you we’re talking $10-12 dollars a year to own these precious URL‘s (they will be even more important in the future). Why you ask? Well, you could always hire a developer and spend several hundred or even thousands developing your own website or simply take advantage of a free GoDaddy service and redirect the URL to your LinkedIn page–voila!, now you effectively have your own website and anyone (and by that I mean anyone) can do it. At the very minimum, purchase your name (and the kiddos) and just hold on to them until you figure out what you want to do.

Next, we’ll talk about using free to inexpensive providers to transition the work you’ve done on LinkedIn with a keystroke or two over to a personalized website–a simple transition and the beginning of what I call a hub and spoke approach to personal brand building. And anyone can do it.

Stay tuned…