Web Worker Daily

If you don’t have a professional blog or web site, you may think that you don’t need to worry about content strategy. Think again. Celine gave some great advice in her article “How to Develop a Content Strategy for Your Professional Blog,” but these days our blogs and web sites aren’t the only windows to our professional souls. If you use social media platforms for professional purposes, you should consider having a content strategy for the material you publish on them as well. Read the rest of this entry »

A good bio shares your experience, builds your credibility, makes a first impression and displays your personality. Having a great Twitter bio is important as it can make or break a person’s decision whether to follow you or not.

Not only do you need to pay attention to what your bio says about you, but also the other fields in your profile including “Web” and “Location.” The Twitter bio may be small, but it’s powerful. Here is a checklist to ensure you your bio passes muster.

Does your bio include relevant keywords? Do you want people to find you by your career, company, industry, location? Why are you using Twitter? Who are the people you want to connect with? Use these to figure out what keywords to use. Read the rest of this entry »

In their book “The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing,” Al Ries and Jack Trout talk about the “Law of the Category,” which is that “if you can’t be the first in a category, set up a new category you can be first in.” I’m coming to understand the importance of this concept, especially when thinking about individuality. Read the rest of this entry »

Now that Bing and Google will be displaying tweets from Twitter and status messages from Facebook, web workers will need to consider how much, and how publicly, we wish to interact with these two social networks.

Twitter

If you’re like I am, your Twitter stream is probably public. For me, the value of Twitter is its ability to let me share news and comments that current and potential clients may find useful. I also use it as a way of interacting with clients if our regular communication channels are down.

So I certainly don’t say anything using @chcs (my company Twitter account) that can’t be public. I also have a personal Twitter feed, @HamiltonChas, that mostly focuses on my comments regarding local politics. I also tweet using @GrowTrains, an account that reflects my interest in improving passenger train service. Read the rest of this entry »

Facebook gives users many tools for controlling what personal information is displayed to friends and others. But if you have lots of Facebook friends, you probably don’t want to create privacy settings for each person you know. However, Facebook allows you to create groups of friends, and you can specify privacy settings for these groups.

As an example, suppose you want to make your cell phone number available to personal friends, but you don’t want business contacts to see it. Here’s how. Read the rest of this entry »

Lately, my inbox has been filling up with notices. Notices about the impending renewal date of my web-based server space, and the domain names attached to said space. Which means, as the emails ominously remind me, that once it lapses, neither I nor anyone else will be able to get at that data. I know I’m meant to be terrified of this possibility, but I just can’t muster an appropriate degree of fear.

I thought about it long and hard, but in then end, there were just too many reasons against keeping my own server space in operation, and too many reasons for storing and publishing my data, portfolio, and contact information elsewhere. Here’s what convinced me to stop the madness and save a little money in the process. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s easier to admit something to your computer screen than to a person’s face. The anonymous world out there behind the monitor can lead us to reveal much more about ourselves than we should. But how much is too much? As you might have guessed, the answer is “It depends.”

Look at Penelope Trunk. She talks about abortion, sex, divorce, bulimia, mental wards and dating on her blog, even though its primary focus is careers. She also says her blog is about her. “But each of you has a list of things in your life similar to that, it’s just a list you don’t want to talk about. I’m not special — I don’t have more stuff that is difficult to talk about. I just have more difficulty not talking about difficult stuff,” she says.

But she is special. She succeeds in revealing everything about herself because she has a solid brand and career that works for her. For most of us, being open and revealing such stories might not go as well. They could affect future jobs, gigs and relationships. Read the rest of this entry »

We don’t often give much thought to our bios, even though they’re actually important and a big part of everything we do online. They’re on the “About” pages on our web sites, in our profiles at social networks, and in pitches that we send out.

Often, we fill out the fields provided by social networking sites like we’re filling out some random form that we don’t intend for anyone else to see, not giving it very much thought. It isn’t until we see how the information is displayed on our profiles that we even take notice. Read the rest of this entry »