Your Online Presence - Or Lack Thereof

Do you have an online presence? Do you really understand how serious it is to your online business? Your career? Your future?

What is an online presence? How do you create one? How to manage it? How to leverage it - completely?

Your online presence consists of 6 main pieces:

1. Your main site. Hopefully, by now it’s a blog.
2. Your personal site. This absolutely has to be a blog.
3. Your profiles in the social communities you belong to. These need to be a consistent representation of your main brand.
4. Everything you put your name on. Including but not limited to: articles, press releases, and reviews/testimonials.
5. Your conversational activity. On blogs and in forums - including private membership sites.
6. What others say about you.  In all of the above mentioned areas.

When these pieces are put together in the right way– meaning they are whole in and of them selves, but added together, create a solid cohesive picture of you– they create a much larger foundation for your brand. These pieces are like layers; they add to each other in a constructive way, but are complete and stand alone. Many people are very organized and do this whether they intend to or not. The majority does not seem to pay as much attention to this - yet branding and getting your brand “out there” is possibly the most important factor in being seen and heard, thus creating buzz and attention, which is what puts money in our pockets. Back to the point: By creating a foundation using all of these methods, you are positioning yourself and your brand on a much more solid footing, which (once set up) is extremely easy to leverage. More on that in a minute.

One more point: By creating an online profile in this way, you will also benefit by a wider reach in the search engines, as well as the credibility this lends. If you have 4800 search results for your name, could you benefit from another 300,000 or 800,000? The vast amount of info that covers your niche can be sprinkled with your name and your brand in a faster and deeper way by going with this approach.

Here’s how you can create this:

1. Hopefully you already have a flagship blog or a site that you intend on turning into one. This site will be the “profile hub” for your brand.

First, assess your current position- where you are at in this so far?  Everyone will be “into it” to a slightly varying degree. The best way I can explain the “how to do this” is to act as though you haven’t done any of this yet. You can add or subtract the pieces accordingly.

So, shall we begin?

We begin with your personal site; if you don’t have one you will need one. Without this step, you will not see results as quickly. BTW, I would strongly encourage you to use Wordpress as your platform…

2.    Your personal site needs to have the following to be effective:

• A bio. You need a solid and in depth “this is who I am, what I’m about, what I’m interested in, what I want to do, and where I want to go” - figuratively. It needs to be appropriate for your niche. Remember: what you put “out there” needs to complement what you are trying to convey, especially on your personal blog. So don’t ruin your chances of becoming a household name by being rude, negative or vulgar here. And most importantly: I’m sitting here by myself reading about you, so make it seem like you are talking to me personally, as if we just met and you are telling me who you are. Don’t come across like you’re on stage at an event talking to 500 people.
• Pictures of you and your family. Pictures are worth a thousand words, right? Ok then, pictures will make you seem more real– and check this out– my girl is studying to be a neuroscientist and study brain functions– cool huh? Anyway, I learned this the other day, though I have read about it before. This is why “a picture is worth a thousand words.” The brain “thinks” in pictures like this. You learned that the word car means an object that typically has four wheels, doors, etc. When you hear or read the word car, your brain goes through a series of “finding” what that word represents and then translating it into the picture it represents. Then it confirms the fact that that word does represent that object. So, watch this– if I say lemon, what comes to mind? Yep, a picture of a roundish yellow fruit. Now in more complex words or series of words, statements, etc., you may not see a picture in your mind, say, for instance, if I say quantum physics. Though your brain will first try to match the word with a picture, it doesn’t always appear clearly in your head. We are visual and auditory creatures naturally… which kind of explains why podcasting was and is so huge– not to mention video. To make a long story short, if you use a picture to represent yourself, and do it regularly, people will begin to match your picture with the niche you cover. And this is the result: When I say The Cosby Show, who do you see in your mind? When I say Microsoft, you see who? How about… Get it? Ok, so you need pictures. Moving on.
• Your favorite people. People will praise you or trash you based on who you follow… Maybe not to that extent, but you understand what I mean. You can add to your perceived value and “worth” by disclosing whom you look up to. Here’s an example: I follow this guy, and have since June-July of 2007. In this article, he exposes someone he follows - a very smart guy, being followed in a very smart way by another smart guy. No, I am NOT kissing his ass. I respect him a great deal, and he has told me whom he gets his inspiration from - it just so happens that I follow this guy as well. How about that– association. Guilty as charged!
• Your hobbies. This adds to you being a real person and not a robot.
• Your likes and dislikes. Help me to see you as a person, and I may relate with you, with what you have been through, and with where you want to be. If you do this well, I will be more inclined to subscribe to you.
• Where you want to travel, where you want to live, and what your goals are. Tell me why you are doing what you are doing, what you plan on getting out of being an authority on whatever subject.

That is the gist of it. Obviously, there is a WHOLE lot more that can and should go into it, but the above are necessities (unless you are Bill Gates or Warren Buffet, but then you wouldn’t need to read this). Oh, and yes, I am a smart ass sometimes and that’s the point– be yourself!

The next piece is…

3. Your social network profiles:

• The good ones are HUGE networks with thousands of members
• The better ones are smaller, specific communities that pertain to your market. You probably don’t want to rely on Myspace to give you an immediate following of people in the MLM or Network Marketing arena. It’s WAY over-saturated for that. Now, if you’re already a BIG name in that field, and don’t have a Myspace or Facebook profile, then you should probably create one.

So, what do you do with your SN profiles?

• You create a summary of your “about me” pages that are on your personal and flagship sites. Take all that info which makes you, you. Condense it down to a skimable version that gives your reader a “snap shot” of YOU.
• I’m not going to go into all the details of this here. If you want specifics, read my article on Social Networking Profiles - why they matter.
• The most important thing I can tell you about this is that for every three profiles you create, you need to rewrite your summary in a slightly different way. What I mean by that is this: Your social profiles should be a snapshot of you and your brand, and they need to be like the “layers” of a picture in Photoshop: Each one is complete and can stand on its own, but if you took them all and put them together, they would create a larger picture that mirrors your “about me” page for your Flagship site as well as your personal blog. They complement each other and stack together to create an even bigger, clearer, more complete picture of you.
• BE ACTIVELY INVOLVED! Did I make that stand out enough, to point out its importance? Good, be part of the top 5% as far as being active, answer questions, add your two cents, and ask questions. I will go into a little more detail about this in a minute.

4. Articles and press releases:

There are really only two things that need to be said about these: Write them yourself and put your own name on them. Yes, you can write hundreds of them to generate a bump in traffic which will continue to grow, but there is a way to get the same results– and in some cases better results by only writing a tenth of that. I will post that article some time next week. BTW, it’s not a trend or algorithm hack that will work now, but won’t when they change the algorithm next month.

• Be very careful what you write about and promote with articles and press releases… Since you “release” them, they no longer belong to you. If something you promote goes bad and it’s not your fault, too bad.  It might as well be your fault. If this happens, YOU just flushed your own credibility down the drain. This also goes for our next piece…

5. Your conversational activity on other blogs, inside forums and private membership sites:

• Adding to these conversations will solidify your online presence. If you do this and are consistent at it, you are showing others that you are serious; you are not only willing, but happy to participate outside of your own back yard. This adds value to the the marketplace. Of course, you have to be adding value for this to work. In two of the private member sites I visit regularly, I have begun to notice a certain type of human being.  They have say, 800 posts– but all but 40 are “thanks for the post,” “great post,” or “that seems right to me.” Thirty of these posts are asking questions that have obviously not been googled by them before asking. Don’t take this the wrong way.  Everyone has to start out somewhere, but did they not even try to find the answer themselves??? The point and the problem is that they are trying to get as many posts as possible so that their post number seems impressive for when they try to promote to the group. LAME! Just don’t do that! Add value or just read for a while. Nobody needs a yes man/woman that bad. (Ok, excuse the rant.)

6. What others say about you:

• If you have done your job to this point, and can “play” with respectful, grown up professionals - this should take care of itself. This will confirm your presence and help propel you into the next level.

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