Posted under Career Management, Online Identity on June 17th, 2008
An important step in managing and owning your online identity is to purchase a domain name of “your name” (example, “johnsmith.com”), before someone else beats you to it.
Dan Schawbel, a personal branding expert who coined the term “eBrand” to tag “a digital representation of you on the Internet”, recently suggested on his Personal Branding Blog:
“I’m still holding onto my future prediction that instead of a resume, video resume, cover letter, portfolio, paper business card, and references document, your personal eBrand will exist as a single URL…In the future, you will need to compile, centralize and store these elements into a master website (yourname.com)…One URL will tell your complete story.”
A number of careers industry thought leaders concur. Instead of having bits and pieces about your career history, activities, and achievements floating around in various places, it’s best to consolidate them all into one easily accessible online location.
What better Web address to present your online portfolio than your own name? Even if you don’t soon plan to launch a Website, don’t think you need a domain name, or don’t know what to do with one, it just makes good career management sense to claim your online name now, especially if you have a common name shared by others.
Registrars like Go Daddy make it easy and extremely inexpensive to do. If your “firstnamelastname” is already taken, be a little creative and try variations incorporating your middle name:
jsmith.com
johnrobertsmith.com
jrsmith.com
jrobertsmith.com
Hyphens between words (“john-smith.com”) are perfectly acceptable, but beware that you will forever have to remind people to “include the hyphen”. If they don’t, they will be led nowhere or to someone else’s Website.
Try for a dot-com first, because most people will assume it’s a dot-com and try to find you there. If all the viable variations are taken, move on to a dot-net as the next-best option.
Posted by Meg Guiseppi
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Career Mentor on 02 Jul 2008 at 8:54 am #
Meg,
.com domain names have ruled the roost for a while now… but look at the possibilities for savvy career promotion with this press release from ICAAN: http://blog.icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-4-26jun08-en.htm
Already some of the Internet tech blogs are talking about the possibilities and implications.
I’m thinking markmcclure.coach
and multilingual variations thereof. (in fact, these new options for multilingual career changers to market themselves via targeted domain names localized to specific languages looks real interesting.)
regards
mark mcclure
tokyo
MGuiseppi on 02 Jul 2008 at 9:45 am #
Hi Mark,
Thanks for reading my post and for your comments.
Great news from ICANN! Some exciting possibilities are about to open up. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.
Regards,
Meg
New Jersey