The Venture Skills Blog

We’re not there yet but with the launch of the main Venture Skills site in the next few days I thought it would be a good idea to introduce some ways to go about getting yourself noticed. none of my suggestions are new indeed most have been covered before or are just common sense.

So here they are the top 5 ways to establish an Internet Identity

1. have a web site…
   Was that to obvious, its at number 1 on the list but may not be your first priority, having a usable domain name is vital however and should be one of the first things you purchase we discussed naming of companies and blogs here, so I won’t go over that again. Once you have a domain you will want an Email address you could sign up for hosting with smtp or you could go with google hosted application which is discussed here, here, and here.
2. Comment & write in forums
   Forums and blogs are great places to get noticed writing in other peoples blogs and forums can get you valuable back links and helps to make your on-line identity noticeable. when writing to forums keep the same username and make it easily identifiable joe97787644 is not going to be as easy to identify as joe@companyname, if you are a small company post under the company name i.e venture-skills in our case. Make sure you use the signature feature with a url to help people (and some times search engines) find your site. one thing to be careful of when building an identity is remember you are creating a trail with your posts if you don’t want something to be attributed to you don’t use your carefully developed brand name!
3. Blogs
   yep grab yourself a wordpress blog and of you go. If you have a web site ready you could blog there but it may be worth using a different site as partially explained here, though there are other reasons then to increase search ranking results. If your main site goes down an information source is still available for example, also it allows you to comment easily on other networks.
4. claim, link, and digg yourself
   use services like ClaimID, LinkedIn, Del.icio.us to manage your identity and to create a network of “friends” claimID is particularly useful service for reputation management especially if you have a common name, linkedin allows you to create an on-line profile which can be found by search engines and is also useful as a place to meet recommended people this type of social network can of course be abused but on the whole it helps to quickly confirm a persons identity. While services like Digg and del.icio.us provide a way for people to glimpse into your surfing habits and by using peoples del.icio.us accounts you can often keep an eye on the competition see this post on del.icio.us data mining.
5. Join communities or create one
   I guess this is really an extension of 2, but writing an occasional blog comment will bring you some traffic only active participation in a community will bring you any real brand power and this takes time. If you can’t find a community to join you can always start your own just don’t expect it to be to popular

Well there you are my top 5 tips to on-line identity If you have read this post and feel cheated, I’m sorry but that’s life of course you could use my final tip but be very careful with it….

tip 6 – be controversial be a flamer be nasty, everyone remembers the bloke at the party who blew up in a rage right? question is do you want to be remembered as a flamer or troll?

Tim Nash

Other Articles on the Venture Skills Network about Identity
Information mining the social way – Using del.icio.us to mine your competitors
The Tim Nash Experiment Part 1 – putting this article into practice

Like what you see try these articles on the Venture Skills Network
What’s the future for Google Hosted Applications – Is the future Bright?
Skype vs the World - Is Skype scalable?
Open Search and Google Custom Search Engine – Using the two

Subscribe to The Venture Skills Blog by Email

Spread it: del.icio.us | digg it | reddit