| By Jason Fitzpatrick Establish and Maintain Your Online Identity
Photo a composite of images by nksz and bezzaro. Your online identity—or lack thereof—becomes more prominent by the day. People rely more and more on search results to help build a picture of you and you want the picture to be a good one. You want search engine queries to direct to you and your accomplishments, not your virtual doppelgangers. If you have a name as common as my own, that could mean a sculptor, photographer, felon, aspiring actor, swimming champion, high school point guard, or any other number of people who share your name. If you've been thinking about whipping your online identity into shape, but don't quite know how to start or what to cover, the following guide will help you establish yourself and make sure all search engine roads lead to you, and not that other John Smith—the one in cell block 4D. Buy a Domain Name
Registering a domain will usually run you around $10 a year, less if you register for multiple years. You can find all sorts of deals throughout the year, as companies give away domains for $3 or other low prices, offer a free domain with a year of cheap web hosting, or other such deals—unless you're already signing up for a web host and getting a deal, it's hardly worth waiting around to save a few bucks. Domain registrars are a hotly debated topic. I've never had any problems with any of the multiple domain registering services I've used over the years, so I can't add anything to that debate. I can say that registering a domain is ridiculously simple, and if you've got 10 minutes and a credit card you can—and should—do it right now. Visit one of the registrars below to register your domain name. Deals, as noted above, vary widely over the course of the year. Make sure to check all of them to see what the best deal is for your needs. While it's ideal to snag YourName.com, don't overlook the .net, .org, and other less-used domains. You can frequently bundle them together when you're registering, grabbing multiple variations like YourName.net/.org/.me and more, for a much lower price than you would if you registered them individually. Direct Your Domain Somewhere
Ideally your domain will point at something you control, like a personal information portal, a personal blog, or something similarly small-scale. If your requirements are modest, and you just want a place to bring together the various fragments of your online personality, an excellent choice is Flavors.me.
Flavors.me offers simple personal portal creation, highlighting your other web locations. It's entirely drag and drop, and extremely easy to customize. If you're not looking to keep up an active site and blog on your own, it's a great compromise between having no site at all and having a building one from scratch. You can link in all the different pieces of your online identity to one place—Twitter account, social network profiles, photos sharing websites, etc.—and spend no time maintaining it. While we're big fans of the polished and easy to use interface of Flavors.me, you might also want to check out similar services offered by Chi.mp, UnHub, and Card.ly. All make it easy to build a simple personal portal to park your domain at and give people who visit your domain something to look at and a way to connect with you. Photo by Sara Wayland. If you want more out of your personal domain than personal portal splash pages like Flavors.me can offer, check out our feature on how to host your domain with free apps. There you'll learn how to set up a personal blog or direct your domain towards an existing blog service. The important thing is that you have a domain—a permanent marker for your online presence—and that it points to something, whether that something is a simple splash page that directs people towards your other activities online, or a full-service blog and information portal you invest lots of time into. Your virtual address needs to provide search engines, prospective employers, and snoopy friends with all the right text and relevant links to propagate your good name. Link, Link, and Link Some More
The more a link to a web site appears on other web sites—non-spam, non-virus, non-porn sites, that is—the more weight search engines will give it. If no link exists anywhere on the web to www.YourName.com, it's practically invisible. On the other hand. if you've included links to your URL in your Facebook profile, your LinkedIn profile, attached to your profiles on link sharing sites like Reddit and Digg, and included it in your commentor profile on sites like, say, Lifehacker and Gizmodo, the crawlers of major engines like Google and Bing will come across it again and again cementing the link between Your Name and YourName.com. This might sound like work but it's not. You're already on the web and you're busily interacting with it. You're at Lifehacker, you're reading this article, and you're probably leaving comments—we have an awesome and active community! Unless you work for the most Draconian of employers, what's stopping you from using your real name and your website address in your profile here? Think of all the places you visit, leave comments, share photos, and otherwise participate in online communities from Flickr to Reddit to comments on your favorite blogs. All of those popular places are excellent springboards to give your online identity a history and weight with search engines.
The easiest way to build your online reputation is to attach your real name and a link to your web site to the things you're really passionate about. If you love snowboarding and post to snow boarding blogs and forums, start using your real name instead of BoardGuy9000. Join discussion forums related to your profession and hobbies—English teachers, for example, would be well served to join the popular English Companion Ning. We can't possibly list all the different networking opportunities that exist for all professions, but we'd urge you to seek them out for yours. Not only is the networking and exposure to new ideas and material invaluable but it gets your name and web site out there. This isn't a call to get spam-like and throw links to your own blog and site all over the web, indiscrimiately. This is a reminder that just having a personal site linked to your account profile is enough to start giving your real name and identity some traction.Photo by clix. For some non-profession-specific places to park your virtual identity, hit up the following sites and—at minimum!—sign up and fill out a bio.
While you'll find no shortage of blog-sharing directories, places to pimp your RSS feed to a wider audience, and other marketing tools online, getting your name and site URL in the prominent places we noted in the list above should do the trick, without the hassle of making site promotion a part-time job. Do Not Go Gentle Into the Digital Night
What message? The message that you're old news, you don't keep up on what's going on, and there has to be someone out there more interesting and relevant than you. If the only thing online that points to you are old blog posts from 2005 and a stale social networking profile, you might as well be walking around with a cassette player and some floodwaters on, exclaiming "We put a probe on Mars? Who's this Obama guy?" You don't need to spend hours a day sharing links, posting to your blog, or updating the world through your Twitter feed but you do need to look like you're alive. Your online presence should not be an archeological snapshot of the life you had in the last decade but an active window into the life you're living now. Update your social networking profiles, indulge your interest in photography and take a few minutes a day to participate in Project 365, share links you find interesting on Twitter, and otherwise connect your real life to your virtual one.
Use the following checklist, referencing the article above to refresh where you need to look, and you'll be done with the basic setup in 20 minutes:
If you have a tip, trick, or experience with personal branding you want to share, sound off in the comments to help your fellow Lifehacker readers build up their online identity. View comments »
| May 5th, 2010 Top Stories |
If you're not actively building your identity and establishing a presence online, you're letting search engines cobble together information, good or bad, and write your public story. You need to establish and maintain a healthy online identity.
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