Your 6-Month Digital Makeover, Part 2
ByPart 1 of Your 6-Month Digital Makeover established a foundation for a digital makeover that should greatly improve your visibility in social networking sites and in popular search engines and directories like Google, bing and Yahoo! In part 2, we will focus on enhancing your digital footprint and measuring and monitoring results. As I said before, you only get positive results by doing the right things, in the right order and progressively monitoring and measuring your performance, tweaking and re-tweaking for better performance. It takes time and effort, but the rewards are worth it! Here’s the task list and recommended approach for part 2 of your digital makeover:
1. Build out Your Profile: Once you’ve created your initial profiles in LinkedIn, Plaxo, Naymz and other social networking sites, begin the process of enhancement. Check out other users’ profiles to get ideas for how this is done and then decide what best fits you. It has been said that the LinkedIn profile is becoming the resume of the future. That statement indicates how important it is to have an impressive profile and what your profile should contain. Add PowerPoint slide shows, blog content and expand your connections to build a critical mass of contacts. Solicit recommendations from those who know your work. Be sure to add links to your personal website, Twitter and/or blog. Taken together, all these will help you create an impressive body of content that will give you credibility in social media.
2. Automate and Cross-Link Content Publishing: Managing your digital presence doesn’t have to be the all-consuming effort it might initially appear to be. If you were to go into all your social media sites individually and re-create or re-publish content, you’d have time for little else. Fortunately, tools exist that will help you automate the process of content replication. A good example of this is twitterfeed which automatically publishes a “teaser” of and link to your blog post on your twitter site. You can publish blog content to your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, too. It’s a simple process and greatly extends your digital reach.
3. Tweak Your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for Greater Visibility in Google, bing, etc.: Search Engine Optimization is the process of adding information like keywords to your personal web, page, blog postings and the like. It causes them to be indexed in search engines. Doing it well is what “optimization” is all about. And it involves adding the title, description, keywords, tags and other robot readable information. The results can propel you and the content you develop to a high rank in search engine results. A full explanation of what this involves is somewhat technical; however, many of the social media applications provide easy to use tools or plug-ins that help your complete the job and make it efficient. An example of this is WordPress, the platform for this blog. A plug-in, All In One SEO Pack, lets me insert keywords and other meta information without the need to know HTML.
4. Monitor and Measure the Performance of Your Social Media: There’s an old saying: ”If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” This is particularly true for a digital makeover. If you are not monitoring your results, you can’t be sure of your progress (or lack of same). Setting up a Google Alert is a great way to track your reputation and the effectiveness of your social networking/media campaign. Simply follow the instructions found on the Google Alert page.
Develop a routine of running searches for your name on Google, bing, Yahoo and other search engines and directories.
It can take several weeks or longer (up to 6 months) to see results, but the processes described in Part 1 and in steps 1-3 of part 2 should show definite improvement and register enhanced visibility for you. The real payoff will come as you make employers’ and recruiters’ short lists and receive employment offers that likely would not have come your way without a Digital Makeover. Need help with your own digital makeover? Read more…
