A strong personal brand online must have a home base. This is a website that at a minimum describes the unique value you provide, states your qualifications, provides your contact information, and links out to the rest of your presence on the web. If you haven’t started your own home base website, it’s easy: start now with our Site Builder.

Ideally, your home base should be at your own URL, such as www.JohnAdams.com. Get this custom URL through us for $11.99/yr and put this URL on every career touch-point: your email signature, your resume, your LinkedIn profile, your business card, etc. Before you choose the URL you want,  read How to Search Engine Optimize Your Name.  This will make your site rank higher in Google searches when people search for you.

Editing text and uploading media is simple, and you can choose from dozens of designs to tweak the appearance of your site. What are you waiting for? Get started building your home base on the web now.

Support me by sharing this post:

Try Our New Tools

We’ve developed two new hands-on tools to make it easy for you to establish a web presence that makes you more hireable:

The Brand Health Dashboard

The Brand Health Dashboard guides you through the process of building a clean and professional image across the web. It helps you track, manage and grade the digital breadcrumbs you leave online. The Dashboard also grades the strength of your web presence based on our Brand Strength Algorithm and the grades of other users.

The Dashboard includes:

• The Recommendation Engine is like your personal career coach. Based on your area of expertise and career goals, it provides actionable next steps to achieve a web presence worthy of remark.

• The Dashboard grades your web presence by breaking it into measurable components: visibility, credibility and niche involvement.

• Every item about you online affects employers’ perceptions of you. Keep track of these digital breadcrumbs about you in one central location to make sure your web presence is as clean and professional as possible.

The Dashboard guides you through the process of strengthening your web presence by:

• Breaking down each component of your web presence into quantifiable, improvable factors
• Suggesting next steps to take in all areas of your web presence based on your area of expertise and career goals
• Helping to track digital breadcrumbs about you, so you can stay on top of what exists about you online

This screenshot of the Dashboard gives an overview of the current strength of your personal brand online:

The Dashboard breaks down your personal brand online into three main components: Visibility, Credibility, and Niche Involvement. Each of these components is made up multiple items. For example, your Visibility is calculated based on your social networking profiles, your directory listings, and your social bookmarks.

Here’s a screenshot of the Visibility section of the Brand Health Dashboard:

The Online Identity Builder

The Online Identity Builder lets you establish your own site to give a better picture of yourself to employers and compliment your resume. Perception is reality on the web. To stand out, you need to have a say in how you’re perceived.

Here’s a screenshot of the Site Settings page:

Put your URL on your resume and have a say in what employers find out about you. Depending on how common your name is, your site might even make its way up to the first or second page of Google results on its own. A personal professional website paints a much more compelling picture of you as a job applicant, more effectively demonstrating to employers why they should choose you over the next applicant. You get your own domain name (URL) to fully brand your personal website as your own.

You’d be crazy not to try our tools for free. You have nothing to lose by checking them out. And you have everything to lose by ignoring them – like the next job you apply for. Really though – go on, give our free tools a try! Reading blog posts alone isn’t always enough to transform you from a “Net Nobody” into a job applicant with a web presence worthy of remark.

Support me by sharing this post: