Whether you work for yourself or someone else, it’s important to establish and maintain both a strong personal and professional online presence. Given the uncertain economic times, you should be actively engaged in how you present yourself to the world (wide web). When prospective employers or clients Google your name, what do they find? If it’s nothing or next to nothing, then you have a great opportunity. If there’s a lot of junk, then you also have an opportunity to turn that around to your advantage! Either way, you have some work to do. Get out the calendar and resolve to tackle one of these items every couple weeks as you polish your image.

1. Register Your Own Domain Name

When branding yourself on the web, there’s no better place to start than registering your own domain name. If your name is somewhat unique, chances are it’s available. If you have a more common name, then try lots of variations. For example, johnasmith.com is taken, but john-a-smith.com is available. If it weren’t, you could try more combinations or see if any of your top choices are open as a .net, .info, or .tv address.

Use a domain registrar like GoDaddy to find out what’s available. When you’ve made your selection, buy it for several years at a minimum. Search engines will sometimes take the registration period into account in factoring how valid an address is.

2. Start a Blog

If you don’t already have a personal website, using a blogging platform is a quick, inexpensive and flexible way to make one. You could opt not to take advantage of the actual blogging features of a blog, but that would defeat the purpose. If you can commit to posting interesting and intelligent observations or articles on a regular basis (ideally at least one of week), then a blog will go a long way toward helping you establish a “voice” on the web.

I recommend using WordPress. Read previous articles about setting up and using WordPress.

I also highly recommend using Feedburner once your URL and blog are ready and working. It will help you maximize your RSS feed, which is essential for getting well indexed by search engines and blogging directories like Technorati.

If you’re a business owner, instead of (or in addition to) a personal blog, you might also consider a professional blog for your company. I’ve heard some businesses argue, “Customers in my industry don’t find [our type of business] online (or on blogs).” To which I say, are you nuts? If that were actually the case for any given industry, it would make an even more compelling case for using blogging and other online resources to your advantage. The fact is, many companies in “boring” B2B and B2C niches have realized how effective blogs are at establishing thought leadership and credibility. A favorite example of mine recently is a commercial and residential fencing company in Raleigh, NC, that installs fencing. The are effectively using a blog to spotlight jobs, discuss challenges and educate consumers on things like how to get permits. The strategy is a good one, especially since it lands their blog on page one of Google’s natural results for raleigh fencing.

3. Hire a Professional Photographer

You know a picture is worth a thousands words. So why settle for using your own cheap, red-eye riddled, poorly lit and badly composed photos on your website and other places on the web? Pay money and sit down for a professional photo shoot, with someone who can make you look like a million bucks. Be sure to get the rights to use your photos anywhere, and obtain digital files.

4. Write a Professional Bio

Spend time sprucing up your biography. If words don’t come naturally, sit down with a friend and a tape recorder and talk about the things that make you unique. Or hire a copywriter to craft the story for you.

When you have it ready, paste it (along with one of your sharp new photos) to sites like VisualCV and LinkedIn.

5. Improve your LinkedIn Profile

Speaking of LinkedIn (you are on LinkedIn, right?), now’s the time to fully complete your profile. Replace your photo. Flesh out every job description you have. Connect with former co-workers and clients. Search for and join groups related to your professional interests. Seek references from former co-workers, clients, teachers and friends. Better yet, write references for others first; they will likely return the favor. Use LinkedIn Answers to search for topics you’re well versed in, and post well-written responses.

6. Launch (Or Clean Up) Your Facebook Page

It’s not just for the college kids anymore. This was the year Facebook really took off, hitting 100 million users in August 2008. So if you’ve been sitting on the fence (my apologies to the above-mentioned Raleigh company), get on it!

If you’re starting with a blank slate, treat it with respect and build your profile carefully using your professional quality photos and bio. Listen and learn before you start posting a whole lot of nothing. Remember this crucial point: anything you post there can help you or hurt you. Several public school teachers in my hometown of Charlotte were fired or reprimanded this year for inappropriate posts on Facebook. Take this and other social networking channels very seriously, unless you don’t care about the possible consequences.

If you’re already on Facebook and have embarrassing information, get rid of it. Lose any bad language, drunken or half-naked photos, rambling diatribes and anything else that paints you in a negative light. The same goes for information on any other social networks you actively use, like MySpace or Bebo.

7. Learn and Apply Best Practices for Search Engine Optimization

A common misperception is that search engine optimization, or SEO, is out of the realm of non-techical mortals. Actually, some essential best practices can be learned fast, and are surprisingly easy to implement.

One of the best books I read this year was Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online(Andy Beal and Dr. Judy Strauss). Among the many tips in the book are specific ways to find out what’s being “said” about you in search queries, and more importantly how to use SEO techniques to make positive changes in how you rank.

If you’re in the Charlotte area, my friend and SEO specialist Corey Creed of Hippo Internet Marketing teaches outstanding classes on SEO as well as pay-per-click advertising (which you can use to more quickly direct links to your personal or professional sites). Another excellence learning resource (courtesy of Corey) is Michael Campbell’s Internet Marketing Secrets. Michael’s free podcast interviews of SEO experts are packed with useful tips. Yet another fantastic resource is Aaron Wall’s SEO Book.

8. Twitter Your Way To The Top

Twitter is service that took off like wildfire this year. Millions of people are now sending short text messages or “tweets” of 140 characters or less. More importantly, they are using Twitter to learn about news and trends instantaneously (often before mainstream media reports on it, like during the Mumbai tragedy), get fast customer support, seek advice and connect in unprecedented ways with others.

For many (myself included), Twitter is initially puzzling and frustrating. A common question early on is, What’s the point? However, if you stick with it, Twitter can lead to amazing things like meeting fascinating people where you live or who work in your industry, creating lightning fast business contacts and uncovering resources you never knew existed.

I suggest following power Twitter users (some of my favorites are Chris Brogan, Wayne Sutton and Lisa Hoffmann) to learn the secrets of this powerful tool. Hint: it’s about giving information freely and acknowledging others, before tooting your own horn.

There are now dozens of third-party sites that tap the power of Twitter for various purposes. Use sites like Twitter Search and TweetBeep to look for keywords important to you, Twubble to find people to “follow,” and Monitter or TweetGrid to watch “real time conversations” happening on Twitter. Get hip to the strange Twitter lingo and keep exploring!

9. Hire A Professional Image Consultant

Chances are the image you think you’re portraying is not what is coming across to others. Are you unknowingly hurting your chances in business and personal settings due to deficiencies in your visual appearance, your verbal or nonverbal communications? Believe it or not, these shortcomings also manifest themselves online, through poor language skills and other ways.

It might be time to engage with a professional image consultant. He or she is trained to help you present yourself to your best advantage and to express your highest potential. An image consultant can teach you how to polish your professional image in three areas:

• Your physical appearance
• Your behavior
• Your communication skills

To learn more about the benefits of working with an image consultant and to locate one near you, visit the Association of Image Consultants International.

10. Get A Real Life

Face(book) it, you can—and should—focus just so much of your attention on your online profile and your virtual life. You also need to make a concerted effort to unplug and engage with living, breathing people in the Real World 1.0. Your virtual life should compliment your physical one, not the other way around.

If you’re starting or already have your own business, join your local chamber of commerce or an association specific to your industry. Can’t find a chapter in your area? Then start one! Or use Meetup.com to invite small groups of like-minded people to informal gatherings. Even on Twitter, lots of users are fond of starting nearly spontaneous “Tweetups,” where people get together for events. Another emerging concept, especially in larger cities, is the concept of casual co-working, or more affectionately known as Jelly. There are lots of opportunities to mingle with and develop great relationships with others, especially if you work alone.

Do you have other ideas to improve your personal and professional brand, both on and off the web? Leave your comments below. Happy branding!

Photo credit: Cogdogblog

In this multi-part series, I’m covering various applications that I’ve personally used and can recommend to anyone starting a web-based business. (Click here for Part 1.)

I’m going to dive right in and list more applications I use on a daily basis. I’m on a Mac, so Windows users please bear this in mind. I’ve tried to find some equivalents out there for you.

For Getting Things Done: Quicksilver, TextExpander, Evernote, Things

Quicksilver is one of those applications that I cannot imagine living without. If you’re on a Mac, it is an incredible tool to zip around your Mac and get things done faster than using the Finder and Spotlight. (Dash appears to be a decent PC equivalent.)

I’m not a power Quicksilver user, but it’s always at the ready to launch programs and find information super fast.

TextExpander is a Mac program that lets you create unique abbreviations or shortcuts that automatically type out longer words and phrases. These are quite helpful, for filling out addresses on forms and even routine stuff like salutations in emails. For instead, I can type breg and hit the space bar and voila, it turns into:

Best regards,

Brandon

I constantly discover new uses for TextExpander, such as saving tedious code snippets. This cuts down on formatting blog articles and other documents. FastFox is another software that works on both Macs and PCs. Both are around $20-25 for a single license.

Evernote is an amazing program that I’m still getting used to. Available for both Windows and Mac (both a free version or premium one for $45 per year), Evernote gives you a web-based site as well as a downloadable desktop version. Using either the web or desktop version (they work together to keep your stuff), you can “grab” and store just about any information you can think of. It’s useful for copying and saving informative web content and images, for example. But probably the best gee-whiz factor is the ability to upload photos to Evernote. That by itself is ho-hum, except when you sync the photos with the Evernote website, any content (text) within your images is now searchable. So let’s say you’re at Best Buy comparing different products, and you secretly snap a couple photos of the price tag and other info. Later, you can pull up Evernote to remember what you were looking at Ditto for that parking space number at the airport that you’d otherwise forget. Evernote also supports the use of tags to categorize information.

Things is a fairly simple “getting things done” software that I like. It’s in beta right now and is free, while the final version will cost $49 when released in January 2009 (or pay $39 now if you sign up for their newsletter before the official product launch).

I like Things mostly because they have a good iPhone app that lets me quickly jot down things I need to tackle, grocery shopping lists or whatever. I could use Evernote for this, but have found it’s buggy when I’m out of good cell range (due to the syncing issues). Things stands alone, meaning it is (for now) just a desktop program.

For Phone Calls: Skype and Kall8.com

Skype is crucial for me, particularly to save money on mobile calls. As a small business owner, I decided not to use my home phone for business, nor my cell phone per se. I initially set up a very inexpensive 800 number using Kall8.com. This is a great service, and for about $8 a month (and a cheap per-minute rate) people can contact me there. I set the Kall8 number to go straight into their web-based voicemail, and anytime someone calls I get an email. I could set it to automatically re-route to any other phone, but I’ve found the voicemail option works well and keeps the charges to a bare minimum.

Skype has proven more beneficial on a daily basis. I bought an inexpensive Logitech USB headset/microphone (around $30) and use it to make calls. I paid for a yearly Skype Out plan, for $29.50. This gives me free web calling in the U.S. and Canada. Since my work is U.S. based (I should reach out to my Canadian neighbors!), this is an unbeatable deal. I also just sprang for my own local Skype number, which comes with its own voicemail. I’m finding that since I use Skype so frequently, it will be nice to give people a number to reach me there. It also has options to re-route calls to my cell phone or wherever. And the cost was also low, $12 for three months (I used a Skype credit I had; otherwise, the longer you commit, the cheaper it is.)

I also use Skype for text chats, along with Apple’s iChat.

For E-Mail Campaign Management

I use Aweber to allow email signups through the site, and to send a series of autoresponders and email blasts to subscribers. My research with a lot of the top web gurus out there (like my friends at Internet Business Mastery) convinced me that this was a great, affordable solution (less than $200 invested so far). I’ll write more about email usage in upcoming articles.

For Project Management: Google Apps and Wrike

In Part 1 of this series, I talked about my appreciation for Google Apps. Google Calendar, Google Mail Google Docs are a powerful combination for keeping track of tasks to do, as well as all kinds of information related to the business.

When I’m consulting with clients, often it helps to set up a dedicated project management area. This allows a more robust system to assign tasks and deadlines, as well as store and share files in a central place. For years, I used Basecamp. I remain a fan of that product. However, I’ve been using another solution called Wrike, mainly due to a lower price point ($3.99 per month for Wrike’s most basic plan, vs. $24 per month for Basecamp’s.) So far, it’s met my needs—although with at least one client, we’ve reverted to using mainly Google Docs and email to share information!

For File Storage/Backups: Dropbox

I signed up for a year of online-based storage using Dropbox, which works with both PCs and Macs. The price: Free for 2GB of storage, or $99 a year for 50GB. The cool thing about Dropbox is that it keeps different versions of your files. So if you mess up and delete a file on your local machine, you can login and view or restore a previous version. Dropbox also makes it easy to share large files with others, either publicly or privately. I’ve used YouSendIt for big files also, along with Drop.io, two other worthwhile and affordable services.

For Photo Editing: Picnik

Anyone who has a blog or other content-sharing site knows what a pain it can be to resize and fix images. I have stopped using any desktop-based photo editing programs in favor of web-based Picknik (free or $24.95 per year for a premium version). It doesn’t get much easier (or fun) to edit photos, especially compared to the learning curve of a Photoshop (or even Photoshop Elements). Picnik also lets you email your photos, create Flickr slideshows and more.

That’s all for now. If you have other applications you recommend for web entrepreneurs, please share them in the comments!

Photo credit: Ralphbijker

In this multi-part series, I’m going to cover various applications that I’ve personally used and can recommend to anyone starting a web-based business.

For those of you just reading for this site for the first time, take note that Web Business Freedom has been online since early September 2008. So it’s a mere babe in the woods compared to many sites. And right now, the site is primarily a blog used to share information as I establish an online presence and credibility (both for you, kind reader, as well as the soul-less bots from Google and other machines that creep and crawl through the site regularly, finding nothing of substance in a rambling sentence like this).

The point is, I’m not using any software for e-commerce or other really advanced activities (yet). Nevertheless, I’m using some smart stuff behind the scenes. Here is the first round of my must-have apps:

WordPress

I’m already written extensively about how to set up a website using WordPress. WordPress is the bedrock software for this site and hundreds of thousands of other web startups. It is open source goodness at its best, and it only going to get better with their next big release (coming soon!).

Read the previous posts (Part 1 and Part 2) to decide which version of WordPress is right for you, WordPress.com or WordPress.org.

Google Apps

Cost: $50 per user account per year

Most people obviously know Google as the Big Kahuna of search, as well as a bunch of other amazing free software. But did you know you can get your own customized company email address, calendar and more from Google?

With Google Apps, you will gain enterprise-level functionality for your domain right off the bat, for free (ad-supported) or for the extremely affordable price of $50 per user account per year. See the comparison between the free and paid Google Apps versions.

At first glance, this might look like a trivial suite of services. But consider the combined power of the applications Google offers. It’s a tremendous value for startups, not to mention that all the information is readily available wherever you can get on the Internet.

The setup is a fairly simple process. After registering the Web Business Freedom URL (see previous article on registering a domain name, I headed over to Google Apps and signed up for the Premium Edition. It includes a 99.9% uptime guarantee for my Gmail account, 25 GB of email storage, a variety of integration APIs (which I haven’t used), and telephone support for critical issues (also haven’t used this, as the service has worked as advertised).

If you have a domain already, you’re a step ahead; if not, Google can help register one for you, although I can’t vouch for how this works.

Once the plumbing is in place, you get your own company start page on Google, where you (or others using your domain) can preview your calendar and emails. You can also customize the page with news, weather and other widgets. Personally, I don’t use this start page, opting to go straight into my Web Business Freedom Gmail account.

Your own branded Gmail alone is well worth the price of admission to Google Apps. It’s just like the incredible personal Gmail account you might already have, but with your email address at your domain name instead of @gmail.com. It comes with the plenty of storage, the ability to search all your emails instantaneously, and built-in instant messaging with your contacts.

Gmail also integrates with Google Calendar, which you can use to set up both personal and business calendars that you selectively share with co-workers, friends, vendors and others. Again, this is a “company” version of your calendar when you use Google Apps. I also consider Google Calendar an essential application to keep track of all your commitments and get things done. I even set up a separate “calendar” to log calls to make (with notes added for completed calls). That way, both appointments and calls are both accessible with Google Calendar.

Finally, you get Google Docs and Spreadsheets. You can use Docs and Spreadsheets much like an online version of Microsoft Office. Create or import documents, edit them in your browser and share with others to collaborate in real time.

Google Docs is a real boon to keeping lots of information online and being able to share and edit files with others. Along with mindmaps I use in Mindmeister, I spend a great deal of time keeping track of the business in Google Docs.

FreshBooks

Cost: $14 per month (that’s for the plan I’m using, aka “Shuttle Bus”)

Every real business has to keep tabs on where the money’s coming from, and where it’s going. At this early point in my new business life, I just wasn’t ready to commit the time to install and learn QuickBooks, which is certainly a great product for small businesses and widely used by CPAs, including mine. However, it’s pricey and frankly a little complicated in my opinion. (And the same issues apply to their web-based version, which I’ve heard is not as good as the desktop version.)

So instead of QuickBooks, I went with a more user-friendly solution, the web-based software FreshBooks. It allows me to quickly set up clients and jobs, enter time and bill clients by email. There are also more advanced options to take payments online.

I’ve found the site to be pretty easy to use (especially compared to my experience with Quickbooks in the past), with just a few quirky things. I especially like how easy it is to send professional looking invoices by email.

The main dilemma at this point is exporting the right information out of FreshBooks for my accountant (who will of course import it into QuickBooks!). There are ways to do it, but not quite as intuitive as I’d hoped they would be. Still, all in all, it’s a simple, easy and cost-effective solution.

Outright

Cost: Currently free (the site is in Beta), though they “do plan to charge for certain features in the future.”

I was also lucky to have found another solution for logging expenses, just prior to signing up for Freshbooks, called Outright (formerly called GoBootstrap). Not only is it free (for now), the even better news is that it integrates directly with Freshbooks. With Outright, you simply enter any expenses you incur and assign them to the appropriate IRS tax category. Outright does a great job of calculating your estimated quarterly tax payments. And since it now connects to Freshbooks, the calculation includes income along with the expenses.

That’s it for this first round of vital apps I use. Stay tuned for more in part two.

If you’d like to suggest any essential applications for web-based companies, feel free to leave a comment below.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/flattop341