Owning Your Online Presence

In this day and age, having a proper online presence is everything in career and business.

Whether you are applying for a job or trying to build your customer base, your online "resume" must be up to date and impressive. It goes without saying that you should not have embarrassing or incriminating photographs easily available to anyone with access to Google and your first and last name. But, beyond merely avoiding embarrassing image searches of your name, there should be positive results in the search engines for your potential business partners or employers to find for themaselves. The first step in improving your professional image online is having your own website with your name and your business featured prominently. If you don’t already have a LinkedIn profile, you should register and fill it out as completely as possible with all your pertinent business contact information and work experience. These days, having no presence online is just as bad as having a photo of you during hell week at your fraternity in the 90’s coming up #1 when your name is searched.  

Besides having a professional website for your business that allows your customers to learn more about you in a controlled environment, it also lets them get in touch with you and compare your services to others in your industry. This gives you a tactical advantage. Since you are controlling the content of your website, you can control your visitors with smart design and thoughtful website copy. When designing your website, make sure you keep certain principles in mind when looking for content ideas.

• Your contact information and a contact page should be very easy to find.
• Make your site navigation as obvious as possible to mitigate any possible confusion.
• List your products and services clearly.
• Make your biography available, highlighting your experience and talents.
• List any special certifications or awards you have received along with press releases or news about your business.

In addition to  having your own website, you should set up as many free business listings as you can (within reason). The main listing worth setting up and claiming is your Google Places listing.  I have personally seen my clients increase traffic by 40% overnight by simply setting up and claiming their Google Places listing. It sounds unbelievable but it is not only true, it is 100% free. 

The first thing you need to do is find out whether or not Google is already listing your business by searching for your official business number and looking to see if Google has already listed you in their “yellow pages” online.   If you find yourself, Great! If not, you can submit your information to Google Places to be included and get a business verification letter within a couple of weeks. After you find yourself, you will find a link that says “is this your business?” that you can click and you will be given a number of different options for verifying that you are indeed the owner of the business. You may need to setup a Google account to do this but if you don’t have one already, I can tell you that there are so many webmaster tools available to a Google account holder for free, it is well worth your time to set one up and get linked up on Gmail. One very important point here is to take your time and fill out the listing as completely as possible. Add your hours of business, payment types accepted, a concise description of your business and at least 3 photos.  If you have any videos, they allow you to upload them as well, so make sure you cover as many bases as possible when completeting your listing. A great feature of Google Places is that once you have "claimed" and "veriified" your listing. Google gives you access to statistics which tell you how many clicks you have received, what keywords you are being found for, and even how many people search for directions to your business. Did I mention this is all FREE? 

Next, you should sign up for a free LinkedIn profile and get your professional details updated and online along with all pertinent links to your personal and business website including any social networking pages you have setup for your business. If you do not have a business Facebook page, do that next. Most people who have not joined the web 3.0 revolution or even web 2.0 think that setting up and using social networks will be “hard” or difficult to use. Quite the opposite is true. These sites are designed to make it as easy as possible for anyone to set up an account. If it is not immediately obvious what to do, they always have very helpful tutorials and FAQ’s. Half the professional advice I get paid a lot of money to give, is readily available on the web if any of my clients could just summon the enthusiasm to Google it.  But, they don’t, and I can keep paying my mortgage… for now.  

If you have gotten this far, you are already miles ahead of your local competition and can expect to see traffic and new customers coming in within days of setting up your website, social profiles, and Google Places accounts ESPECIALLY if you make sure each one is linking to the others somewhere. Try Googling your name before and a week later to see what has been indexed and what is still waiting. Usually a couple weeks is as long as it can take to see decent local results.

There are similar services on Yahoo and Bing that allow you to verify your business and make sure that when people are searching for you, they find you.   Once you get that far all you have to do is pick up the phone and CLOSE THE DEAL.

Article Written by Nathaniel A. Kingsley of The Stanford Who’s Who
Business Social Marketing
http://stanfordwhoswho.com