Professional Presence

Professional or Personal Website

Professional and Personal websites can be of great value:

  • Seeking or being ready to seek employment, entrepreneurial or altruistic opportunities.
  • To augment a business website – some people will remember you, but not your business.
  • As a hub or connector for your social media presence. The hot social media platforms change often. Your personal website can remain constant and link them all.
  • It can provide an email address that is uniquely yours AND not subject to the changing email marketplace. Anybody out there still using Yahoo, AOL or an ISP for their primary email address?

Resumes Are Dead

resume-john-doe Let’s face it – resumes no longer have the impact they used to. In fact some companies are not even using resumes to hire – No More Résumés, Say Some Firms. Even companies that still take resumes are placing an increasing reliance on using your online presence to decide whether to call you for an interview. And you know the moment you give someone a resume or job application, the very first thing they will do, even before they read it is to look you up on google or bing!

If one of the first items that pop up in search is your own website, how impressed do you think they will be with your tech savvy?

Many professionals are diving into social media, but finding that they spend too much time with too little return. Savvy professionals are creating a strategy that guides business opportunities, whether jobs, investors or other opportunities using a funnel, hub and defined goals & metrics.

Personal or vanity domain

A personal domain is one that is associated with your name or some other characteristics you consider uniquely yours. An example might be JaneSmith.org or ZenHiker.me. These are also referred to as vanity domains.

The ending of a domain name is called a TLD or “top level domain”. Some examples of TLD’s that may be good choices for vanity domains are.

  • “.org”
  • “.me”
  • “.info”
  • “.net”
  • Newer vanity TLD’s – “.guru”, “.expert” and more

“.com” and “.co” can easily be mistaken for each other. If you tell somebody that your domain name is XYZ.co they may hear, sink or just automatically type “.com”. Do not choose “.co” because someone else is using “.com”.

If you own the “.co” and not the “.com” you may be inadvertently sending them to somebody else’s site.

The best approach overall is to pick one to be your main website and consider owning others for two reasons:

  1. So somebody else doesn’t grab them.
  2. You can have them all redirect to your main site so no matter what people find they end up at your site