Creating a Professional Profile Using a Blog

The purpose of a professional profile is to be found online. This is a passive marketing and promotional strategy enabling you to be visible and accessible 24/7 for the purpose of doing business, finding a job or keeping your career in momentum.

The profile can contain your resume, biography, work samples, testimonials, case studies, white papers and briefings, pictures and schematics  It depends on your field and line of work.

The goal is to come up at the top of a Google search on your name or skills and keywords embedded in your profile.  While Blogger.com, owned by Google, is free, I use www.typepad.com. If you pay for their basic site, you will have no ads. Follow Typepad’s instructions for setup, registration and pointing a URL to them. Name the blog-site after your name, not the name of the newsletter or you company. People will Google your name and this way you will come up on the screen.

Next go buy your URL don't worry if it's .net or .biz or .org. What's important is that you get your name. Again, people will Google your name before typing in the URL. Point your URL to the Typepad site. See the instructions on how to do that provided by the URL provider (network solutions, verio.com, godaddy.com, register.com)

Now design your page. Typepad will walk you through all the basics as to your layout, color choices, font styles and how to archive, categorize and add links in the side columns to other websites. It's really that simple.

Keep in mind that to get the logos and photo layout for the following example, http://www.wednesdaynetwork.com, requires someone skilled in CSS code and html. You will need to find a tech savvy person to help, not a web developer as they would want to charge a bundle and build a whole website that’s not need. I think anyone can do a great one page site for themselves.

Further, uploading photos and graphics and implanting them into the body of the page is no problem. The instructions are clear and easy to follow. Other blog-sites include www.wordpress.com, www.blogger.com, www.squarespace.com. They all have their pros and cons depending on your goals, skill level and available time. I am not going to do that analysis but would appreciate feedback on what you find out.