In the wake of so many redundancies and companies closing down, I thought it might be helpful to do a round-up of all my personal brand stuff that I generally keep up to date. Of course, as any other lazy human will testify, when there is less impetus to do so, it takes longer to update things or keep things up to date. However, having all this in the back of my mind, means that I tend to keep records of things, knowing that I will need that detail at some stage.

Domain Names

Let’s start with the easiest one. Your name on the internet is like your name IRL, it’s the thing people see first. The first thing people judge.

Registering a domain so so ridiculously easy these days. Here in Aotearoa the Domain Name Commission is in charge of regulating domain names – and has created a handy-dandy list.

Once you grab the name you want (and yes, I would suggest, the simpler the better – I grabbed firstnamelastname.com for me and my two kids – for them even before they were even born, and we grabbed our lastname.nz to have our entire extended whānau sorted!), then you can decide what you are going to do with it.

Emails

The most obvious use of a domain name is to create an email address that uses it. This means you don’t have an unprofessional email address for business purposes. Don’t worry, I totally get it, I used to be obsessed with a mid-90s drama called Renegade, so for a while, my email was renegade_girl@domain and I can only imagine what potential employers thought!

Most email companies will give you aliases for free, it’s just a matter of setup. So for myself, I have hello@ hola@ and kiaora@ all going to the same place.

The two main email providers are Microsoft’s 365 and Google Apps. They are much of a muchness in terms of pricing and setup. Both come with online storage of your data (Onedrive and Google Drive respectively), as well as various other plusses and minuses. It’s a matter of preference for you. There are, of course, a multitude of other email providers out there… Proton Mail has been lauded by the security community – so if you are worried about the security of your data, then that is one that you could consider.

Note that if you don’t want to get a domain name. It’s still important to sign up with an email provider with a sensible name – like firstname.lastname@provider or firstInitial.lastname@provider – something like that 🙂

Websites

This is less necessary for most regular humans out there. I wanted to create an online portfolio of my previous work, as I do contracting from time to time – so for me, it was important to create a place to put all the stuff I’ve done, in a way that is aesthetically pleasing to me and portrayed who I wanted to portray. I chose to do this on WordPress, the other two main contenders for ease and similar pricing are Wix and Squarespace. Most of these, again, are much of a muchness in terms of pricing and ease of use. All three have free and paid templates you can use to make your site look different. I would usually suggest you pay a few dollars to pay for a template – then you can pick the features you want and fewer people out there will have the exact same template (it’s amazing how $50 is enough to deter thousands of people)

Social Media

Another way you can be conscious of your personal brand online is to look at what your social media says about you. Yes, that means if you’ve grown up in the social media era, it might be important to delete older posts that put you in a different light than what you want to portray now.

In particular, for those of us looking for work right now, having a professional and filled-in LinkedIn Profile is a good idea. I spent a few dollars to get professional headshots done – but you can achieve amazing-looking photos with great lighting using your phone, so that isn’t needed as much. I’ve spent the time to interact with people’s posts and when I write blogs (like this one) I sometimes copy it onto the Articles bit – so that people who don’t click on links still get to see it. Of course – this is particularly relevant to me because I enjoy copywriting and creating written content – but it may be relevant to you – perhaps you’re a person wanting to establish yourself as an expert in your chosen field.

If you’re unsure how your social profile looks to strangers, use Incognito or Private browsing and check it out. That will mean that you spot things that might not be obvious to you, as you are logged in.

If you don’t want a particular social media profile easy to find, there are private modes for most of the popular sites out there – just make sure you cull your friend list if you only want certain people to see things. It’s important to stay on top of changes to the way that the programmes surface content as well – it changes often – and privacy settings change as a result too.

Confused?

If you’re confused about any or all of this, I’m happy to help. Please go to my contact page, and I can help sort it all out for you. I’ve done this sort of thing for many clients, from solo performers to large and medium-sized companies. For larger teams, it is important to think about your file storage systems from the beginning, the time you save in setting up your taxonomy at the beginning will reap its rewards later on.