When you work from home, most of the impression you make with business contacts is online. Most of the way you get your paycheck is online, too, unless you make something to sell at a market somewhere. But even in that case, how are they finding your booth at the market? Do your customers ask if you are on Etsy or a similar online format?
If you honestly evaluate your work-from-home plans, they are going to include your online brand. Online branding is the catch-phrase for “everything anybody can find about you on the internet and the way it makes you look to the world.”
People who work from home, particularly if they are freelancers, need to pay attention to their online brand because it affects their business. People who work from home for a company need to pay attention to their online brand because it affects the way they are seen by their employer. The bottom line is, your online brand is worth investing in because it means money.
Our premium LinkedIn Profile Development services include online branding and profile development coaching. That means it will be customized advice for your particular situation, giving you the tools to use the internet to your advantage. You get an hour of personal coaching, a usage guideline, and a filled-in template to make it easy to deal with profiles as you increase your professional presence online.
In a way, everyone that works from home is involved with marketing themselves because people don’t have an accurate picture of what you do. Your online brand should be one way to show them that accurate picture and get the respect you deserve.
One of the ways to improve your online brand is by being active online in ways that focus on your professional arena.You can start out by using search engines to find news in your field, but you can also find niche communities of your peers and connect on social media sites like LinkedIn, Google+, and Facebook.
Once you have some professional places to hang out on the web it’s a good idea to start interacting with others on those sites. Make intelligent comments on blog posts, have discussions that are courteous, and always have a link back to your own blog under your name. Be the opposite of a troll. This gives you a wide audience of people who view you favorably and probably will be interested in visiting your blog to see if there is more good stuff to be found.
When they come to your blog, have some good stuff there. This isn’t as difficult as it sounds:
link to content that you found helpful and make some comments then ask for opinions
write a short (250-500 word) post every few days about something in your field
have a mix of news items and evergreen content that is always useful
If you do a little bit every day, it slowly builds up into an impressive, authoritative presence that gives weight to your online brand. When potential employers look you up online, you look good. Many people actually are hired based on internet activity that created a relationship and developed respect for the knowledge displayed. The job offer came as a result of the added authority of their online presence.
If you decide you need professional help for your online brand, we offer online branding/profile development coaching that just might be what you are looking for.
The photo you use for your profile on social media and professional sites is prime real estate. This is the face of your online brand, right? This picture is what comes up on an internet search by a potential employer, colleagues looking at your LinkedIn profile, and networking contacts. People are normally visually-oriented, and that profile pic is what their eyes go to first. So why waste that advantage?
No profile pic at all is like saying you don’t care — so why should they care?
Using a logo markets that logo, not your career
Poorly lit, grainy photos don’t say much about your professionalism
Selfies rarely look like anything but selfies (and please, NO FISH LIPS!)
Wild party profile pics look like HR nightmares
Your kid is cute, but they aren’t hiring your baby. The sames goes with pics of you and your significant other. Don’t use those for your professional pic–unless you co-own a business together and are building your brand based off of that
Using a different profile pic for each site weakens the impact of your brand
If you want to maximize the potential of your profile pic, think seriously about what it looks like and where you put it.
Having the same photograph as the face of your online brand on all your profiles; LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, your blog, etc. gives you consistency. People associate consistency with reliability, and that instant recognition of your photo acts as a logo for your brand. But the photograph itself also matters quite a bit, so it should be excellent. You can set up proper lighting and background then use a timer, but it generally will work much better if a photographer friend takes your picture or you opt for a professional session.
Background should reflect your industry or be a color flattering to you. Lighting should come from several sources to avoid weird shadow effects (this is why self-portraits rarely work well) and smiling is more appealing than a deadpan mug shot. You should be dressed the way you would be at a job interview and look professional. It’s a good idea to renew your profile pics once a year so they are current.
Your online brand is a combination of everything someone like a potential employer can find about you on the internet. Your profile pic is the face of your online brand, and profile development should include making sure you aren’t wasting its potential.
3 Reasons You Might Need Help With Online Branding
Online branding is hard to avoid if you are going to be involved with society. It’s actually happening whether or not you want it to, because some of your information is probably online already. Don’t believe me? Try doing a search on your name — I’ll wait.
This is why you need to “own” your online brand. Maybe there was a lot of entries with your name, maybe just a few, but when you submit your resume to a company, the name on your resume is what they will search. It’s a very important part of your professional package. But sometimes, you need to get help in order to get your online brand what it needs to be. Here are three possible reasons to ask for that help:
You are overwhelmed with all that is going on in your life right now. Sometimes life throws a real curve ball and you are starting over from square one. It could be a divorce, a death or major illness, coming back into the workforce after a hiatus, a family emergency, or even a natural disaster. If there is too much on your plate, this is one thing you can delegate to a professional.
You don’t really know what you are doing with the whole computer thing. You are learning, but you are afraid of making a mistake. I always tell newbies to the computer age, ‘You can’t break it!’ Getting professional help will give you a confident start and you can take it from there. Or you can learn as you go and try it out. Either way it’s a reality you will need to face –e-commerce, for example– you can’t go to an actual Amazon “store”… you need to order online to get what you want from there. Start small and work your way up to profile creation.
You now realize that you blew it big time. You have been buzzing along posting selfies and crazy party photos, and now you wish you’d listened when your mom told you to be discreet. She was right and now you are sorry, but you have no idea what to do about it. A professional would have experience in this area and could help. We help with reputation management and can help you clean up your digital dirt. Then you can tell all the tweens you know to heed your warning.
Professional Resume Services offers several types of online branding help, from LinkedIn Profile Development to Online Branding/Profile Development Coaching and even an Online Branding Power Package (all on the link; scroll down and see). It’s also part of what is offered in our Coaching Services. If you need help with your online brand, you can find it here!
It isn’t summer yet, but it soon will be time for the teenage job market to open up for high schoolers looking to start their working careers. Even though these first jobs will probably not become careers, there are a lot of ways the first job does shape the habits and expectations you have about the working world. Some of the standards have always been there: Getting to work on time, not goofing off on the job, doing what you are hired to do, and being trustworthy have always been part of the picture.
But today’s teens are already networking and have a social media presence long before they start thinking about earning a paycheck. Because they are so familiar with digital interactions, and because they are immature, the idea that what they say and do online will affect their future is hard to grasp. It isn’t uncommon for someone to suggest their child work in a friend’s business and find out that their kids’ online activities were unacceptable for the position’s standards. How embarrassing is that?
If you have made an effort to continually ask questions like “Can social networking get you fired?” and listen to your child’s answers, you begin to see what their perspective of online activities is. Pointing out the realities, cases where that behavior did cost a job, furthers the discussion. Start talking about how important online branding is and what it is. Challenge them to do their own research and prove you wrong when you say that employers will look them up online.
This can go a lot of directions every time you have the conversation. Cyber-bullying, sexting, and all the rest of it are hopefully going to come up so you can hear what your teen has to say and tell them what you’ve learned. Online behavior didn’t used to be on the “getting your teen ready to have a job” list, but these days it is probably up in the top priorities.
If you think about it, you have “employees” of your own.You pay them to do things for you — find information on what concerns you, keep track of data you need to access again, and anything else you don’t want to do yourself. Some of your employees are paid when you get the bill from the phone company and your internet provider. Others are paid when you get your electric bill. Some are actually people who provide a service you appreciate. Technology can be an excellent employee, if used correctly. How much easier is life when your smartphone works? How much harder is it when you can’t figure it out? If you don’t have a smartphone (“substitute computer”), or whatever technology you use on hand, life can feel out of control. One problem with this employee of yours is that technology changes over time. Your comfortable way of doing things gets out of sync with the way the rest of your world is moving and you miss out on important details. This is when a person who provides a service can help. You could catch up with the current technologies yourself, if you spent the time and energy to figure it out. But employing someone to get you started lets you get up to speed much more quickly and you get a head start.
The LinkedIn Profile Development service is a good example of what I am talking about. Right now, LinkedIn is one of the best technological tools available for connecting with others in your career field. But they are moving at a very fast pace. This service puts you in the best position to start putting technology to work.
When Is Your Digital Birthday? Why Should You Care?
Have you seen a sonogram of a pregnancy in a friend’s announcement online? That sonogram is the beginning of a particular child’s digital footprint, before they are born. Similarly, every time someone posts a cute picture, mentions their name, and shares a funny video of the child, their digital footprint expands. This is the beginning of their online brand — their digital birthday.
That child does not have control over what other people are posting about them now. But someday, they will ask a search engine to compile every bit of information that has been posted with their name online and the digital version of naked-baby-on-a-rug will not seem so cute. At that point, online branding and profile development coaching start looking like a good idea.
You have more control over your digital footprint than a child does, but it takes work. If you are not proactively curating everything that can be connected to you, then it will accumulate without your control. Even not tagging your photos and using privacy settings will not prevent a facial recognition program identifying you or a security breach. Mistakes can be made, too, and your identity might be confused with someone else to your detriment. Once stuff goes viral, there isn’t anything you can do but damage control.
Because employers are increasingly using search engines to find candidates, your information might not even show up in the first few pages of “qualified potential candidates” when they start looking. If the computer doesn’t select you as suitable, there’s no chance to make an appeal. If you are not active online, monitoring all your information and adding value to your digital presence with LinkedIn activity, professional posts, and making sure your brand is what you want it to be…
then you will be as helpless as the infant in the sonogram, subject to whatever someone else says about you and unaware of what is going on.
Did you know that most human resource directors are going to be plugging into sites like LinkedIn to see what potential candidates they can find for an open position? To quote the Society For Human Resource Management:
Organizations (77%) are increasingly using social networking sites for recruiting, primarily as a way to attract passive job candidates. Fewer organizations (20%) use social networking websites or online search engines to screen job candidates.
That means that the way you appear on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google +, and anything else online matters. It also means that you have a way to make part of your job search passive, just as some entrepreneurs have passive income. Here’s how that works:
the income producer is carefully crafted to function with little maintenance once it is in place
the entrepreneur will generally use several streams of passive income to make enough money to pay the bills
samples of passive income: ads on blogs, ebooks, rental properties, royalties
Now, the way this works in your job search is that once your profile is created, then you can maintain a presence on LinkedIn with considerably less effort. You don’t have to stay on the site all the time because your input keeps your profile current and the search engines will bring you up in the first few pages. Passive — as long as you are prepared.
Those streams of passive income need maintenance but mostly flow by themselves, and your presence on social media sites is there when you are not at your device. The way your presence on social media sites is portrayed is dependent upon the way you maintain it.
As a result, the top reason you should be on LinkedIn is because it works for you while you are not there – if you use it correctly.
