We are entering a new era on the Internet, that I’m calling WebYOU.0.

With the advent of the Web 2.0 movement, many sites began to provide a better experience. Finally, web developers had some decent tricks up their sleeve to make sites more usable. Coupled with our fast Internet connections, web usage shot through the roof and upended traditional media habits.

But an even bigger shift is happening. A growing number of websites and software tools now allow non-developers (99.9% of the population) to express themselves online, quickly, cheaply and non-technically. Now, there are more ways for the average person to tell the entire world, or a select group of friends, who they are and what they are doing, 24 hours a day.

And with all the economic uncertainty going on, now is a great time for people to think about how they present themselves online, personally and professionally. In many respects, WebYOU.0 is about building and enhancing your personal brand on the web.

It’s not enough anymore to have a paper or PDF resume; prospective employers are also likely to Google your name to get a sense of who your are. Do you have a personal website? Are you on any social networking sites? If so, what kinds of information are you posting (which is a reflection of your personality and judgement)?

Finally, if you’re looking for a job and aren’t actively using some of the tools available, you could be selling yourself short and missing out on opportunities to connect with people who can help you.

If you already have a job, then substitute “prospective customers” instead of employers, and the same principles apply. Are you missing out on attracting potential new business?

With all the above in mind, here are some of the ways you can use WebYOU.0 to reach out to others, both from a personal and a professional standpoint.

www.[YourNameHere].com

Registering a domain is nothing new. But in WebYOU.0 terms, it’s now becoming more common for individuals to register their personal name. It’s cheap and relatively easy to register a domain, using a service like GoDaddy.com, Network Solutions or PairNIC. Even so, I’m still surprised how few people think to do this. In terms of your personal brand, it’s imperative to own your name as a URL. If you have kids, by all means get their domain names, too, as early as you can. The longer a period of time you register the names, the better the pricing is.

After securing your personal domain name, it’s important to use the registrar’s service to redirect the domain to your personal resume, blog or website. Make this a priority, so your page isn’t parked with one of those useless “coming soon” pages.

In the same vein, be sure you to use a personalized email address, preferably yourname@yourdomainname.com, or as close to your real name as possible. Ditch your goofy nickname, and do yourself and prospective employers or clients a favor by using a responsible, grown-up email address! At the very least, get an address with your full name at Google, Yahoo or another respectable provider.

Blogs

Blogging is clearly one of the most powerful techniques available for anyone to share their ideas and opinions. According to Technorati, there are more than 175,000 new blogs created every day.

No wonder. There are a lot of free, easy-to-use sites that can have you blogging in minutes. Try WordPress (my top pick), Blogger or Tumblr, to name a few.

And remember, you don’t necessarily have to blog (verb) to have a blog (noun). Some people creatively use blogs as digital resumes. If you go this route, simple turn off any pages that suggest it’s a true blog, otherwise it’ll look stale if you’re not regularly posting updates. Other tools like Google Sites will let you build a simple site without the blogging part.

Microblogs

For an even faster, less demanding way to share information, consider one of the “microblogging” sites. These typically allow you to send text updates of roughly 140 characters or less, from your computer or cell phone. You can also send hyperlinks to websites and photos. Twitter is perhaps the best known of these services, along with others such as Pownce and Plurk.

As with your domain name and email address, use your real name and not a pseudonym or nickname. You’ll come across as more professional and make it easier for others to find and connect with you.

Rather than putting all your virtual eggs in one basket, sign up and create basic profiles (including a good photo of yourself) at several of these sites. Then, use an all-in-one site like Ping.fm or Hellotxt.com to update your status everywhere with a single message. This includes updates on the larger social networking sites (see below).

Online Resume

In addition to using a blog as a resume, your might consider a site like VisualCV or Carbonmade. These make it super easy to create a page with your relevant expertise and experience.

I’ll grant some older professionals (40+) some slack if you don’t have a blog or an online resume yet. But for younger people in general, and especially college students and recent grads, you have no excuse. Sadly, many colleges and universities still don’t help students do this. As an employer myself (now with my second company), I’ll tell you straight up: if I have a job or internship opening and you don’t have a decent digital resume, forget it. Every other person who does has a starting advantage over you.

Social Bookmarking Sites

Sites like Digg, Delicious, Reddit and Stumbleupon are ideal for saving and sharing websites you like. To be a good WebYOU.0 participant, you need to help others discover useful information, just as they’ll help you do the same. Plus, saving your bookmarks to the web, in various places, lets you access them anywhere.

Social Networking Sites

There are now dozens of quality sites that exist to help people connect with their “friends” or business colleagues. Some of the better ones include Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo.

Set up accounts with your real name, a quality photo and a profile. Often, these services will assist you in determining if any of your existing contacts are already a member; if not, you can invite friends, family and professional colleagues to link to your account. After settling into these services, take time to search for and join any groups related to your career or personal hobbies. If you don’t find one, it’s easy to start your own!

Keeping tabs on what your friends are up to is one of the primary benefits of these social networks. To make this process easier, consider signing up for Friendfeed or SocialThing. They will let you to see all of your friends’ updates and shared online activities at a glance.

Business Networking Sites

Business networking sites are essentially social networking sites for working folks. They are crucial for building a professional profile, finding jobs or employees and even inexpensive research. Check out Linkedin, Plaxo, and XING.

Wikipedia has a good, comprehensive list of social networking and business networking sites.

How Are You Using WebYOU.0?

What are some of your favorite tools and techniques for building your personal or professional presence online? Where do you see WebYOU.0 heading?

I think the implications are staggering, from a personal and professional standpoint. There is a growing gap between people who are using the web to share portions of their lives online, and those who aren’t. It’s the Digerati vs. the Digilliterates. And WebYOU.0 is changing the rules of communication for companies big and small, as people band together to vet their frustrations and opinions about products and services, in real time. That’s another benefit of using many of these services; if you have a gripe, chances are good that a company might be listening and will respond directly to you.

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Photo credit: Pam Cantu

One of the most joyous times in life is finding something that makes you so happy, you gladly do it without fear or hesitation or worry. The ideas and the energy just seem to flow right through you. Suddenly, you’re writing. Or painting. Or acting. Or rebuilding cars. Whatever it is, you’ve found your Muse.

For weeks, or months, you’re pursing your dream. You feel more alive than ever. There’s the feeling that nothing can stop you.

Then suddenly, life happens. The bills are piling up, the rent’s due, the economy sucks, the kids have to eat. And it’s see ya later, Muse. So your dream gets deferred…again. The guitar goes back in the case. The novel is shelved, the paint brushes dry up. No more blog posts.

It happens to the best of us. Recently, it happened to a very talented friend of mine. Patrick McLean is an ace advertising copywriter, one of the best I’ve known. But it’s his day job, and unbeknownst to me, one that he had grown to really despise a few years ago.

That is, until he found his Muse. In short, he decided a few years ago to start a podcast, called The Seanachai. It’s a funny name that means a traditional Irish storyteller.

Without really knowing what he was doing, Patrick starting writing and recording these quirky stories, more for his own benefit than anything. And lo and behold, people starting listening. Thousands, in fact. He started getting mentioned in books about podcasting, winning awards and getting some plum radio interviews. He even got referenced in the Seanachai Wikipedia entry.

But the familiar roadblocks of life eventually came along, and the storytelling sputtered. Listeners started wondering what happened.

Well, I’m happy to say Patrick decided to get serious about storytelling again. And The Seanachai is being slowly reborn. As Patrick puts it, “I’m in a very different place with this than I was the first time around. The first time around it was an act of desperation. I was terribly, terribly frustrated. I felt like I had a lot of talent and exactly zero outlets. So I said, screw it. I’m going to do one of these audio pieces a week. And I didn’t care if anybody listens.”

This time around, he is looking at it seriously—not just as a creative outlet, but as a means to make money doing something he loves, and that his audience loves as well. Because really—whose brilliant idea was it that artists are supposed to starve their whole lives?

In the process of my launching Web Business Freedom and Patrick re-launching The Seanachai, we decided to help each other out, with ideas on how to grow his site and mine. When you’re in something for the long haul, the Buddy System pays rich dividends. It’s important to have someone to keep you honest, look over your shoulder and, every once in awhile, give you a swift kick in the pants. We’re all scared of the same stuff: running out of things to say, or looking back wondering why we allowed our dreams to escape in the mundane march of time.

Patrick and I sat down and recorded some thoughts this month in a podcast, and he posted them on The Seanachie along with his very compelling personal journey behind the site. I invite you to listen to A Conversation With A Friend. Better yet, subscribe to Patrick’s wonderful collection of eclectic musings.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/batega

Note: This is part of an ongoing series of articles that chronicles the steps taken to create WebBusinessFreedom.com.

In the previous article about using WordPress, I mentioned some of top reasons to use it for your blog or small website.

One of my priorities when planning for Web Business Freedom was to establish a very professional look for the site. I am firm believer in the power of quality graphic design. Unfortunately on the web, design often takes a back seat to content. However, I think both design and content play a role in making a positive impression on your users.

Initially, I felt strongly about creating a custom, one-of-a-kind design for this website. So I asked a very talented designer I know to give me a quote. When it came back at more than $5,000, I decided to try to look for a cheaper option. Being in startup mode, every penny counts!

Fortunately, there are a lot of very good pre-defined WordPress layouts, otherwise known as themes. Once you have WordPress (the .org version) installed on your server, you’re free to use one of these themes.

Thousands of themes are free, and the only dilemma is spending the time searching for something to fit your needs. WordPress has its own free themes directory that allows you to search for many of these. Using a free theme is a good way to get started with WordPress. And you can always change your mind and choose another design.

If you’re hankering for something with more pizzazz than a standard free theme, but that’s less expensive than a custom design, you might try a premium theme. Typically, these will be very well designed WordPress layouts that also come with extra features built in, such as ready-to-use widgets that will enhance the functionality of your site.

I was fortunate to run across a relatively new site, WooThemes, that specializes in premium themes. One of them was very close to a rough sketch I had in mind for the Web Business Freedom site.

Like most premium theme sites, WooThemes provides detailed instructions on how to download and install their themes. After deciding on the theme I liked, I debated whether I wanted to do the installation myself. While not a novice with things like FTP and server settings, I was nevertheless a little intimidated. Essentially, I felt it would be a better use of my time if I could find someone to install the site for me, add my logo to it, tweak a few other settings, and make sure it was all working.

A friend suggested I contact one of the designers at WooThemes. I figured it was a long shot, but in a surprisingly short time I got an email back from Adii, a self-described WordPress Rock Star and one of the WooThemes‘ founders. He agreed to help out, for a lot less than what I was quoted for a custom design. Granted, I could’ve spent very little money to do everything myself using WooThemes, but I still decided to hire Adii.

Adii spared me a lot of time by setting up the hosting, installing the theme, adding my logo and color scheme, activating some essential plugins and even tying into a third-party email campaign system I use. Even with Adii doing the bulk of the work, I still invested many hours overseeing the job and testing the site.

Overall, the process went smoothly. Inevitably, though, I hit a snag or two along the way to launching the site. I had trouble uploading images, and when Adii wasn’t readily available to fix the issue I asked another developer for help using the WooThemes‘ support forum. That person was able to fix the images problem, but unfortunately he wiped out my logo and the email signup box! I accepted responsibility for not waiting on Adii, which is a lesson for anyone launching a new website: Be patient. Stuff will happen, and haste makes waste. Too many people working on the same files is a recipe for disaster.

Once everything was working correctly, I started adding pages and content to the site. As I said, WordPress is pretty good and user-friendly, on the whole.

My biggest gripes revolve around actually inputting content (copy) and uploading images. As anyone who has written for the web knows, it’s trouble to use Microsoft Word and then copy-and-paste into WordPress. Even in HTML/text mode in WordPress, many characters get mangled in the process.

At first, I opted to first write my articles in Google Docs, but also found some formatting and copying-and-pasting to be quirky. Then I switched to TextEdit (I’m on a Mac), but again found some gremlins creeping in. It became a tedious process of pasting text in WordPress, saving in “unpublished” mode and previewing each article (repeatedly) to check the formatting.

Finally, I started typing all articles first into TextMate, which seems to be working better than any of the above methods. I also use BlogAssist and TextExpander to quickly type common HTML tags, like commands for bold, italics, links and paragraphs. I wrap all of my content in tags in TextMate, beforeI copy anything into WordPress. I strongly encourage anyone who is thinking about blogging to become familiar with how to use these basic HTML tags, at a minimum. You can add tags right in WordPress, but the editing window is small and not a great place to spending editing your text.

I’m sure there are probably easier ways to get raw content into WordPress, but for now these are my personal preferences. I also know there are other tools that you can use to post content via a web browser or email, but I am too picky about the way I want things to look to pursue these options.

In terms of images, I think WordPress makes it a bit difficult to upload and assign images within posts. Some of WordPress’ built-in tools just don’t work well, so I find myself having to manually copy the full URL of each image that I upload and add this entire string as the image reference. It’s also important to size and compress images properly, before uploading them to WordPress.

To sum up, WordPress is a fantastic platform for launching a blog or small website. However, it does come with a learning curve, especially if you are a novice with server lingo/setup or HTML. It pays to get someone to help you get it set up correctly from the start. And later, you need to learn or brush up on some simple HTML and photo editing techniques. Otherwise, you might get frustrated at wacky formatting or images when creating your blog masterpieces.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jetheriot

Note: This is part of an ongoing series of articles that chronicles the steps taken to create WebBusinessFreedom.com.

So you want to start a website? There are an overwhelming number of options available, both in terms of the software you’ll use for the initial setup and ongoing maintenance, and the hosting platform or environment where your site will live.

It can frankly lead to analysis paralysis trying to pick the “best” system to use. There is no 100% perfect system out there. But some are more user-friendly (especially for beginners) than others.

For a lot of people (including me) WordPress just makes good sense. If you’re primarily starting a blog, WordPress is open source (i.e., free) and is the top blogging software of choice. Alternatives include Blogger (also free) and Typepad (various paid versions from $4.95+ per month). I’ve used both Blogger and Typepad but kept coming back to WordPress.

Why WordPress? For me, the main advantages are:

• It’s free (but not necessarily, depending on which version you use…more on that in a moment)
• There are thousands of excellent design templates or layouts available for WordPress
• There are dozens of plugins and widgets that enhance the features of WordPress
• It is very customizable
• It is (relatively) easy to install
• It is (relatively) simple to use it to add, edit and delete content

Besides being good for a basic blog, WordPress is decent to use with any basic website. That said, it is not for everyone (look elsewhere if you need advanced databases in your site, for example), and it is not as easy to implement or use as some may lead you to believe. To take full advantage of WordPress, you’re going to need to get your hands in some HTML code at some point, or have someone who knows some hosting and programming basics help you out.

WordPress: Where To Start

There are actually two flavors of WordPress, and they can be confusing to the uninitiated. There’s a free, hosted version at WordPress.com, and a free, downloadable version at WordPress.org. The main difference is, with the first version the WordPress organization does all the heavy lifting, and you don’t have to install anything or worry about hosting. With the second version, you have to physically download the software and then upload and install it on the right kind of web server that is capable of running WordPress (it requires PHP and MySQL).

The folks at WordPress actually do a great job here of explaining the differences between the two versions.

The real crux of the matter lies in the control you want or need to have over your site. If you just want something up fast and aren’t worried about the ability to really control or customize your website, go with the free hosted version. Otherwise, you are much, much better off in the long run using the download-and-install route (.org version) despite a steeper learning curve. You’ll only be able to control the look-and-feel and functionality of your site using WordPress.org.

And here’s something that is not at all obvious—it’s actually ideal to set up a free WordPress (.com) account first, even if you don’t ever actually make use of a site there! The reason is that this is the only way to get a WordPress API key (a special code that will allow you to use services and enhancements built on the .com platform) while still hosting your blog elsewhere. This is extremely valuable, especially in order to use WordPress’ anti-spam service known as Akismet. And it can’t hurt to set up your free (.com) account, especially if you’re new to WordPress and want to play around. Go ahead, you can mess around as much as you want and it won’t cost you a dime.

After setting up a free WordPress account (the .com site), you have two choices to get the “real thing,” the full downloaded version of the WordPress software. The simplest option is to find a web hosting company that comes with WordPress pre-installed, or via a “one-click installation” type of service. WordPress suggests some web hosts, and there are plenty of others out there who are WordPress-friendly. (The host for Web Business Freedom is Fused Network.)

The second option is to physically download WordPress and install it on your web hosting server. This is a lot trickier and not for the techno-phobic at heart. Michael Pollock of Solostream.com has put together a great step-by-step WordPress installation guide and accompanying screencast.

Once it is installed, the real fun begins! In the next article, I’ll talk about the basics of using WordPress, including selecting the design, adding site content and enhancing your site’s functionality with plugins and widgets.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mwichary/2140391908/sizes/m