Webinar Recap: Your Personal Online Brand, With or Without You

career development, #careergravityThe economy isn’t exactly going gangbusters, but the online environment is, and that’s what #CareerGravity is all about—you, going gangbusters online, creating a loud, disruptive, impressive and effective digital footprint. Those who attended Thursday’s presentation heard Jon DiPietro and yours truly, #CareerGravity’s co-founders, discussing all that. We used the terms “online footprint” and “digital footprint” interchangeably. Both are part of a growing lexicon that refers in some way or other to your personal online brand.

Here’s a recap of the concepts we shared:

Exist With Purpose

career development, online purposeYour personal online brand will exist whether you want it to or not. If you’re not tending to it online, creating your own image and reputation on the web, the web itself will do so, for you. And what ends up, up there, may or may not be what you want. Why leave your personal brand online to chance, allowing the search engines to display the many out-of-context, unfocused activities you’ve engaged in online, as if those results somehow represent the true you, the image that you’d want to project to the world?

No, you want—need—to fashion an online image that’s a true reflection of your professional self. That’s how you get a job today; that’s how you create a career of your design today. You can create gravity for your career. And it’s the meaning behind #CareerGravity. All this newfangled stuff about search engines and social media and one-on-one communication really is the killer app that enables you to turn heretofore set-in-stone professional relationships on their heads. Whether you’re a corporate professional looking for that next job in your career, a free-spirit creative type looking to connect with a start-up team driving innovation, or an aspiring solopreneur who wants to paint her own career path, the principles of #CareeGravity constitute the tools that can propel you to your goals.

Take the Steps

social media outposts, steps to creating #careergravityAre you ready to take the step? Actually, take three steps, and you’ll have created the basis to generate #CareerGravity:

1) Build a “home base”—once the tried-and-true documentation of your professional life, your word processor–created résumé has become a relic of an era fast coming to an end. Your CV now needs a home base online, a website where you can showcase your professional self. This multidimensional, dynamic manifestation of your trusty résumé probably ought to reside in WordPress, a low-to-no-cost blogging tool. A constellation of easy-to-understand factors informs the nuts and bolts of that website. Last week’s webinar, as well as the free #CareerGravity Blueprint, provide more details.

2) Build “outposts”—once you’ve created a home base to feature your recast résumé, you’ll want to create profiles for yourself in social media. For your first forays, we recommend moving into any two of the following three: Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Eventually, you may elect to add YouTube to your repertoire, too. Again, the webinar and #CareerGravity Blueprint explain how to do so, in more detail. The idea is to use your presence at these social media outposts to interact with people whose influence in your now-growing network will help you to design the career that you want. Concurrently, use the power of your blog. Create new content there regularly, push that content to your social media outposts, and overlay those two activities with continual interaction in social media. Over time, you will attract to your website (i.e., blog) people who, now aware of your existence and professional value, will help you in further creating a career worth having.

3) Measure and improve—how do you know if it’s working? That’s the principle behind this, the third step. Various analytical tools (e.g., Google Analytics and more) will provide you with data to know which activities are yielding you the best results and to determine how to improve activities that aren’t producing. For instance, you’ll learn which social media outpost is driving the most traffic to your blog, and which pages of your résumé—existing on a multipage website, with each page representing a different area of your expertise and experience—command the most attention of your target audiences.

Get the Recording—While You Can

what is #careergravityDid you miss #CareerGravity’s first-ever webinar, by the way? The recording of it will remain available to anyone through 8pm EST on Thursday, April 19. Then, that recording will migrate behind the firewall of #CareerGravity’s proprietary archives. But there will be a way, in the future, to gain access to those. For more on that, stay tuned to our blog over the next several months.

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