In this second part of our online personal branding series, we will cover how to source (come up with), create and publish content on your website. I am assuming that you have a basic knowledge of how to setup a personal website or blog online. If you do not think you have enough background information in this regard, please, read the first part of this series, “Establishing an Online Presence” .

Now, why should you take the time to post content on your website? Why should you put in your best efforts into publishing the best information that you can? Before we move onto the technicalities of doing so, let us look at some of the reasons you should make sure you have the best content you can put together. These include:

1.    Portfolio Development: Irrespective of your current (past or intended future) professional calling or title (professor, administrator, student, entrepreneur, employee, civil servant, etc), you most likely have a storehouse of information related to your field of expertise or area of focus that you can publish and share with the world. Every man and woman is a powerhouse of quality information if only they can harness it. And, you are not an exception.

2.    A Unique Brand: When you regularly publish quality content online, you establish yourself as an authority in your field of expertise or interest. If you frequent the web, you are probably familiar with people who made a name for themselves on the Internet and attained celebrity status by just publishing online. This also sets you apart from the crowd as you would have proven yourself to possess both a sufficient working knowledge (or extreme interest) in your area as well as the ability to effectively communicate these to a wider audience. If you have been paying close attention, you would have noticed that online bloggers are increasingly being invited to appear as guest (or sometimes even as regular) commentators on talk shows and TV programs to share their insights on politics, the economy,  education, environmentalism, etc.

3.    Career Advancement: If you are in search of a (perhaps better) employment opportunity, then go ahead and start a blog or website and share great information. This has landed people jobs at some of the nation’s top media companies. If you are a professional, you can also get more qualified business prospects by publishing online. You are also more likely to land consulting gigs when you publish and establish that you are an authority in your field than if you do not.

4.    Academic Prospects: As a student, it makes a big difference when you publish. You are more likely to qualify for scholarships, grants and other forms of financial support since you can readily point to or mention your online publications when you speak to or apply to prospective scholarship or grant opportunities. This sets you apart from those who have nothing to present more than just a resume and a personal statement. You have already made a statement online about your interests, experience and/or expertise.

There are many other reasons to publish online, depending on your field of endeavor, interest or expertise, but the aforementioned are just a few of the most evident.

Now that you know why you should publish online, let’s get to how to go about it quickly, easily and systematically. There are three elements to it:

1.    Sourcing or Creating the Content: This component deals with how and where to get the content you will be publishing on your website.

2.    Content Organization: This deals with how best to sort your content into different and sensible categories so that every piece is filed in the right place and could be found easily by your readers or website visitors.

3.    Publishing Your Content: This is where you actually (and finally) post your content online. This is the final stage in the content publishing system.

But before we move on, you should know that the content you publish online can be in any one or a combination of a number of formats. These are:

• Text: This is what the bulk of information online is published in. This is the usual text that you see on websites and blogs. This can also take the form of PDF documents that you can post online.
• Audio: You can also upload and publish audio files or podcasts on your websites. If you are more of a speaker than a writer, this route may be a better option for you than writing, especially if you are not particularly comfortable with the art of the written word.
• Video: Whether you shot the video using your web cam, phone or had a professional videographer’s help, you can post them on your website or blog and share with the world (or just your website users.)

You can also post a combination of any of the above content formats, if and when necessary. For example-if you are a poet-you can post the text of your poem online as well as a video of you reciting it and/or the audio files of the recital. It is all possible with the Internet.

Now, let’s get back to the three elements or stages of publishing your content online:

1. Sourcing and/or Creating Your Content

This is the first stage. Here, you have one of two means of getting content:

• Source for content from already available resources.
• Create fresh (new) content to post on your website or blog.

Five Simple Ways to Generate Your Own Original Content

To come up with your own original content, all you have to do is look at the different dimensions or aspects of your personality and the circumstances around you and you will see that you have a never-ending pool of content anytime you want it. These dimensions are:

1.    Personal Passions: Whatever personal interests you have, if you are sufficiently interested or grounded in it, you can create great content around it. Here are some ideas:

• Science: Do you enjoy hacking (professional security hacking, not to be confused with malicious cyber crime), then blog about it; it may land you a Computer Security job or consultancy when you least expect it. Are you a nerdy programmer? Build some cool software and blog about them. Do you love or hate the current state of the world of engineering? Make a list of all that’s wrong with it and each one, one at a time, on your website.
• Arts: Do you love drawing, sketching cartoons, penciling funny caricatures of your friends or politicians, or are you a skilled Photoshop pro? Scan and post samples of your work on your blog or brand them with your name and website address and allow college newspapers and other website owners and bloggers to publish them for free. You may soon start getting gigs for some regular comic stripes or graphic design work.Are you a skilled photographer or an avid videographer? Then post samples of your work on Flickr, Youtube and your own site and develop a strong following and watch what happens next. (Hint: People with jingling pockets may come calling with regular paid work.)
• Literature: Are you a creative writer, a gifted wordsmith, an artful or skilled storyteller, or a passionate spoken word artist? Go ahead and publish your work on your website. The publishers may soon be knocking on your door with some juicy deals for you.
• Activism:  Are you always talking about how the latest police brutality case has spurred racial hatred or how the oil companies are making life unbearable for the average people? Do you worry and always complain about the deplorable state of education in minority communities? Or do you always grunt and grumble whenever the issue of immigration or global warming is brought up in the media or by those around you? Congratulations! You may have the spirit of an activist! Now, go on and share your thoughts and concerns online. You will soon find out that you are not alone and will create a large and loyal following of like-minded and concerned people.
• Volunteerism: Are you always taking part in one walk-a-thon or the other? Do you find yourself spending time volunteering at your local soup kitchen instead of cooking your own turkey during Thanksgiving? You should share your experiences and passions with others by maintaining a blog. You will soon develop an army of likeminded and highly motivated volunteers. Society will be better off because of your efforts to publish and recruit in one breath.
• Sports: Many of us are avid sportsmen and women (or at least passionate fans). Whether it is football, soccer, baseball, basketball, scuba driving or even the extreme sports, you will always have enough going on that you can create and publish regular and rich content for your website and the avid visitors who will be storming it to read, listen to or watch every new thing you post on it. You can cover the wins, losses, athlete updates, games, etc in that field. You may never know when a reporter will call you up to appear on their show as a commentator to discuss the latest beating that “Team X” (a fictional team) got at the hands of their arch rivals!

2.    Hobbies: Whatever your hobbies are, you can create a blog or website around them and post regular content dealing with them. It does not matter whether you are in love with gardening, fishing, traveling, learning new languages, developing new recipes or making movies. Whatever your hobby, you can create content around it. Discuss related news, industry trends, local associations, upcoming conferences or seminars or hard-to-find deals that you come across.

3.    Professional Experience: Are you currently working (used to work or hope to work) in a particular field that you are passionate about? Discuss best practices, your likes and dislikes about the status quo or workings of the industry and ways to improve them. If you have observed it closely, then you have “insider knowledge” (not to be confused with proprietary company information) that you can share with others.

4.    Academic Pursuits: If you are a student (and are hopefully passionate about what you study), then go ahead, do research and publish your findings on your website. Or, discuss the state of your area of interest (the good, the bad and the ugly sides of it and possible ways of improving them) and post these on your website. If you are a professor, you have most likely published materials in your field, presented at conferences or professional events or collaborated on academic works. Whatever it is, publish them on your own website too and go a step further by exploring and publishing more (detailed) areas of your expertise.

5.    Personal Background: Do you consider yourself an evangelist for your beliefs? Are you concerned about the current state of your ethnic or racial group? Do you find yourself worrying about the standard of living of people of your background or community? Do you come from a family of geeks and technocrats? Whatever your background, it is interesting enough that you can find a lot of information that you can publish and share with others on a regular basis. Discuss new legislation that would affect you, trends that are changing the tide (positively or negatively) or your insights into the best ways to solve the recurring problems.

From the foregoing, you would have realized by now that whoever you are and whatever you are involved in or want to be involved in or associated with, you can create valuable and original content around it.

2. Organizing Your Content

Once you have figured out and made a list of all the possible ways of sourcing and creating content for your blog or website, the next thing you should do is to:

a.    Categorize: Organize your content into different categories for easy filing and management. For example, if you are a poet, you may want to organize your poems into themes. So, you could have a “social” category (for your poems about family, relationships, etc), a “politics” category (for those poems about how bad your elected reps are running and ruining the government), a “personal” category for those poems that has to deal with your daily musings and experiences, and so on. Whatever you area, you can organize your content into categories to make it easier for you to collect your thoughts together and for your readers, visitors and loyal fans to find your content.

b.    Use Tagging: Most modern website development and blogging software (like WordPress, Joomla, and others) give you the ability to ‘tag’ your content. If you have used the Photos feature on Facebook or Flickr, you have already been exposed to the idea of tagging. For your content, you can also tag every article, video or audio/podcast file that, for instance, has to do with ‘web programming’ (if your focus is on computer technology). The WordPress blogging system is especially great for this.

c.    Cross-Linking: Once you have sufficient articles, videos or podcasts posted on your website, you can cross-link them to make it easier to find or continue reading on a certain topic. For instance, if your interest is on creating new recipes, you can cross-link the part 1 of “How to Cook Delicious African Fufu” with the Part 2 and 3, and so on. You can cross-link content you post on different websites online so that it becomes very easy for your readers to stay updated on what, when and where you publish online.

3. Publishing and Managing Your Content Online

This is the third stage in your path to having your content on the Internet. There are a number of ways that you can make your videos, audio (or podcasts) and articles available online, depending on your area of focus or your chosen and target audience.

Depending on the format of your content and your target audience and their internet content consumption habits (where they go to watch videos, read what other people write about or hang out, etc), you can post your content on a number of platforms and or cross-post them on any number of places online. These include:

• Video Sharing Websites:  If you have videos that you want to post online, then you may want to think about creating an account on Youtube, Viddler and other video sharing websites and uploading your content on them. You can then easily embed these videos (link to them) on and from your website. This way, you won’t have to worry about whether you end up having too much website traffic and having to deal with a monstrous webhosting bill for the bandwidth that your videos will be consuming from all the thousands of views.
• Social Media Sites: If you have an account on Facebook, LinkedIn, Squidoo or other social media websites, you can post your content on them or post links to your website content on them. For example, you can use the “Notes” feature on Facebook to pull the content from your website or blog and have them automatically posted on your Facebook Notes whenever you publish new content on your website or blog.
• Your Website or Blog: When you create your own website or blog (see www.jalloh.com/tech for more info on how to do so), you can post whatever format of content you want (videos, pictures, articles, audio, etc) on your website. Since your site is your own personal online storehouse of information, you can publish any content on it. Want to upload that video of you giving a speech at your club’s annual convention? Upload it to your website for the whole world to see. Have you been wanting to share your feelings and experiences about that community service program that you participated in? Just write an article on it or record a video or audio of you talking about it and publish it on your website.

Now that you know how to source or create content, how to organize them for simplicity, ease of navigation and access, and the different ways you can publish your content online, let us take a look at what I call, “The Five Golden Rules of Online Publishing.” There are certain principles of “common sense” (as uncommon as common sense may be) that you should have at the back of your mind whenever you decide you want or need to publish any type or format of content online, whether on your own website or others’.

The Five Golden Rules of Online Publishing

1.    Thou Cannot Retract What Thou Publish: If you don’t want your mother, significant other, employer or business partner to know about it, then think twice about publishing it online. Because once it’s online, it’s not going anywhere. In addition to the ease of sharing published online content, there are sites that specialize in archiving the content available on all sites online (and you can be rest assured that “no website is left behind”.) So, think twice. You may perish by publishing the wrong way or content!

2.    Thou Shalt Treat Thy Online Personality Like a Delicate Brand: Just as what you say, wear and look like comprises your offline personality, what you publish online is what your online personal brand is composed of. So, be careful about what you post online as your online personality WILL be judged by it.

3.    If Celebrity is Gold, Privacy is Golden: Sometimes you may be tempted to post details of your personal, professional and love life online. Please, DON’T! Do you feel like updating your Facebook status to say that you just left home or are leaving tomorrow for vacation and won’t be returning until mid next week? Don’t! You may come back home to an empty house or even expose your family members to your online “friends” who may be sexual predators, burglars, and other types of criminals or misfits.

4.    Er, keep Your Qualms to Yourself: Did you just break up with your significant other? Did you just have a heated argument with a co-worker or think you are taking too much heat from your “control freak” of a boss? Please, don’t whine about it online; instead try to settle it with them. Once you blog about it, post those embarrassing pictures of them or update your Facebook wall to reflect it, it is now public information and could have dire consequences. So, think thrice about sharing your personal troubles or rants online.

5.    Don’t be a Stray Webbie: Or, in other words, “no common sense lands you in a gutter of nonsense.” Are you so obsessed with the web that you publish every single detail and waking moment of your life online? Do you share where you eat, your full date of birth, where you go and stay and your most intimate likes and dislikes with your crowd of Facebook “friends” (aka stalkers) or Twitter followers? Then, you are probably “virtually naked” and have left total strangers and stalkers with a very clear and working map of your whole life. So, share and publish with care. In a virtual world, the last thing you want is to be vulnerable. Remember: DON’T be caught virtually naked!

That may be all you need to know to learn how to source, create and publish your own content online to develop your online personal brand. In the next part of the “Online Personal Branding” series, we will take a look at how you can develop a large and responsive following of people who will read and share your content and drive even more people to your website or blog. Till then, please, go online and start building your website or blog and publishing content on it. Thank you for reading! J

If you have questions, comments or suggestions (on what you may want to see covered in the next issue, etc) or to get a list of resources that you may need to use, please, visit www.jalloh.com/tech . I am counting on your feedback. For all personal questions, please, send me a message . Now, go and start publishing online and building your online brand! Hasta La Vista!

Part 1: Establish an Online Presence

Whether you are a student, professor or a staff member of an academic institution (like BCC), you can effectively create and maintain your own online personal brand in 3 simple steps. In this piece, I will share with you how to go about this quickly and efficiently. Now if you thought that an online personal brand just involves having an account on Facebook, I would just like to say that that is just one (perhaps very small) aspect of it.

But first, “why do I need to create a personal brand online?”, you may want to ask.

Here are a few reasons:

• Your potential employers (if you are looking for a job or hope to change or “upgrade” your current one) will most likely run a query (search for you) online. The problem is that if most of what they find about you involves your unscrupulous (“night out” parties, beach adventures and childish rants on Facebook, Myspace, etc), then you probably won’t go far as far as a job is concerned. Your whole world now exists online.
• Your potential partners will “google” you to make sure you are not a potential liability for them when your tracks are eventually uncovered. (This applies to both your professional and social life.)
• You may have namesakes that are criminals, felons, etc and who may have made it onto news items that are currently (and will continue to be) online. You may be mistaken to be the same Jose Garcia (not real name) who stole a car and was profiled in your local newspaper, or Rick Smith (fictional character) who defrauded a bank and got a “fair mention” in the New York Post.
• You may be thinking of creating your own online portfolio of activities, experiences, volunteer work, professional work (articles, papers, speeches) and presentations, etc.
• And many more…

In any of these cases, the only way to redeem yourself (when you have a misfit namesake) or create a lasting impression is to create your own personal brand online. You can do this in 3 simple steps:

• Establish an online web presence,
• Create and/or publish your content, and
• Develop a loyal and large following, both online and offline.

In this article, however, we will focus on the first of the thre steps-establishing an online presence-and cover the others in the next issues of the newspaper.

3 Simple Ways to Establish a Web Presence

The Internet thrives on content-text, images, videos, etc. But these don’t also exist out of nowhere. They are uploaded to the web by people, like you and me. There are a few ways to create a web presence, some with their own “pros and cons.” Here are some of the most widely used forms of web presence:

1. Social Network Profile: If you have a Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn or Twitter account, then you have a social network (the technical term given to online socializing websites) profile. In the case of Facebook, you can further customize your profile page’s link and make yourself easier to find by going to www.facebook.com/username and customizing your Facebook page to something simpler like www.facebook.com/aminagarcia instead of the string of incomprehensible code that appears when you load your Facebook page.Now, while having social network profiles is part of the online dimensions of our 21st century personalities, these are not enough to create a sustainable and professional personal brand for yourself.
2. A Free Blog or Website: You can do this in one of two ways, the free or the professional way. Websites like blogger.com, wordpress.com and others offer you the opportunity to “tag along” on their website. For example, if your name is Amina Garcia, you may create an aminagarcia.blogspot.com or aminagarcia.wordpress.com blog. You may not have access to all the tools you need to create a professional website, but it is a good place to start.
3. A Professional Website: The professional way of creating your website or blog is to having your own “full domain” website. So, you may have www.Jalloh.com or www.AminaGarcia.com, for example. These portray a professional image and you have a host of tools and resources available to you to create your own personal brand.
4. In this case, you will have to register a domain/website name (for a little less than $10/year) and pay to host (rent space for it online for)  your domain (for as little as $5 a month). With a professionally-hosted website, you will also be able to create and use personalized email addresses. So, instead of having amina-garcia@gmail.com or talktoammy@yahoo.com (both fictional email addresses), you can simply create and use such emails addresses as email@emilygarcia.com or contact@emilygarcia.com .(A snapshot of a sample professional website: www.Jalloh.com )

While this obviously costs some money (typically less than $70 per year for both the domain and website hosting), it helps you create a better and more professional image for yourself. Imagine having a line on your business card that says something along the lines of:

Amina Garcia

Phone: 718-555-5555
Email: contact@AminaGarcia.com
Website: www.AminaGarcia.com

That hands down beats a business card with an @gmail.com or @yahoo.com free email address any day and anywhere. It also portrays you as somebody who is very serious about their image, both online and offline.

What You Should Do Next

While you await the next article on how to easily and simply source, develop and publish all types of content (text, videos, presentations) for your own professional online brand, here are a few things you should do:

• Setup accounts with the major social networks:

?        Facebook.com

?        Twitter.com (Great for “micro blogging”. Think, “group texting gone online.”)

?        LinkedIn.com (This one is especially good for professional networking. It is to your professional life what Facebook tries to be for your social life. It is a great site to network with potential employers and mentors, get recommendations, form partnerships, stay abreast of industry trends, polish your resume and land new job offers.)

• Setup Your Own Personal Website:

?        Go to either of www.blogger.com or www.wordpress.com (better option) to register your blog and learn how to set it up by playing around with the interface.

?        You may find tutorials on www.Wordpress.tv (if you choose to set up your blog on www.wordpress.com) or at www.youtube.com/bloggerhelp (if you chose to use Blogger.)

?        Place a link on your blog to your social network (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc) profiles.

?        Frequent and watch this blog for a list of some free and recommended blogging tutorials, online branding tools and other resources. I will be adding more every week, God willing.

That will be it for part 1 of the “Online Professional Branding Series.” If you have questions, comments or suggestions (on what you may want to see covered in the next issue, etc), please, do let me know by posting below. I am counting on your feedback. For all personal questions, please, send me a message using the Contact Form here. Thank you for reading. Now, go and start building your online brand!