When I started to go through my strategy, I realized that what I really needed to do was get started with the plan, and get moving now. The more I waited, the less my message was getting out there on the web. So, I made up a list of all the places I wanted to put my name, developed a common fact sheet for myself, and set myself to work on a few destinations each day.

Get Started Today

The only thing holding back your name from getting out is you. Today, we’re talking about how to get from the planning stage into the action phase and getting your word published online. As I did with my own plan, we’ll go through with the list of destinations, talk about the personal fact sheet, and then discuss blogging as a student.

Identify the Online Destinations and Networks

By figuring out which services you feel fits your needs, you can shape the message that you want to convey. If you want to go for an innocent, law-abiding student, don’t go posting a profile on “imacriminal.com” or something like that. The networks that you subscribe to say just as much about who you are as what you say on those profiles.

There are two different strategies you can use at this point. One where you put your name on every account you can find just to make sure you claim your name and someone else doesn’t. The other is to pick and choose which services you put your name on. I took a hybrid approach where I got an account on every service I could find to secure my name and put up basic information. What distinguishes each service is the level of engagement and interaction that I put into the site. For example, I have a MySpace page but I hate the network and what it represents so all you’ll find there is a VERY basic profile so no one can take my name there.

Here are a few services that you can use to get yourself started:

• ActiveRain
• Bebo
• Blogger
• del.icio.us
• Digg
• DOPPLR
• Facebook
• Flickr
• FriendFeed
• Friendster
• Google Reader
• Jaiku
• Jumpcut
• Kiva
• Last.fm
• LinkedIn
• LiveJournal
• Ma.gnolia
• Multiply
• MySpace
• OpenID
• Plaxo
• Pownce
• Second Life
• Seesmic
• Shelfari
• StumbleUpon
• Technorati
• Tumblr
• Twitter
• Upcoming
• Wakoopa
• Wink
• YouTube
• MyBlogLog

Develop a Personal Fact Sheet

By having one document with your “public information” in an accessible place, you can present a consistent image across many platforms. I will sometimes vet someone against a number of different services before I will interact, follow, etc just to try to get a sense of who they are and what they are about. If they’re two different people (by the way they present themselves) on differing sites, I would be a little leery.

The best thing you could do is to visit the social networking sites that you have now and look at what questions they have on the profile builder now. Then, you’ll make on Word or text document that has titles and the info broken up into groups. From there, you can copy and paste into the pertinent fields within each new service. Some common questions:

• About me
• Favorite movies
• Favorite music
• Favorite TV shows
• Favorite activities
• Favorite quotes
• Favorite interests
• Favorite places
• Education
• Contact Info (include a link to your website, discussed next)
• Photo (can’t be in a text file, obviously but have a headshot consistently across all sites)

Get a Website… NOW!

That’s right, do it right now, there’s no reason not to. You can get a blog for free and trust me; you can leverage a blog the same way if not better than a static website. Free solutions are also called hosted blogs. This means that you sign up with a company to get a blog, usually http://yourusername.blogcompany.com or some derivative of that. In most cases, you can go ahead and buy a domain name and point it to your hosted blog. For example, I could have http://www.jamesmconnors.com point to http://jamesconnors.wordpress.com if I wanted to.

Buying your name as a domain name is another step along this path of personal branding. Using your first and last name will not only solidify your place online but it will keep others from taking it and possibly letting recruiters find another version of you. It is really simple to buy a domain - head to http://www.godaddy.com and register there. Do a search on Godaddy promo code and you’ll find discounts all around for that.

The two sites that have emerged as the leaders in free hosted blogs are http://www.blogger.com powered by Google and http://www.wordpress.com - quite possibly the most popular blogging software out on the market (all free and open source of course). These solutions will get you up and running, give you some layout and image options as well as let you customize some parts of the html/widgets to give it extra functionality.

If you need more options and are ready to deal with hosting your own, http://wordpress.org is one of the most common platforms available. In fact, most hosts can auto-install or one-click install wordpress for you on your new account. I use http://www.bluehost.com for my hosting but Godaddy.com also has hosting available. I will be going into how to use your new blog more in the Friday issue.

TALKBACK

Do you have a blog? What social networks are you on? Do you have any other tips for getting your name out there? Leave a comment here or on the listener hotline at 206.203.1877 and email at collegetechcentral@gmail.com.

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