LookupPage Blog | Professional Web Presence and Visibility

Building Your Own Online Presence

Creating a website on your own corner of the internet isn’t as difficult, time consuming or expensive as you might think – in fact, it’s remarkably easy, quick and cheap these days.

Building Your Website from Scratch

Services like Yola (formerly SynthaSite) allow the public to create unique websites within minutes, for free. With WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) or drag and drop design capabilities, anyone can create a website without the need for a programmer or expensive site hosting.

The service provider offers everything you need to build and manage your own website and sports premium features to provide even more tools and services if there’s something a bit more advanced you wish to accomplish.

Creating Your Blog

With so many free platforms out there, if you don’t already have a blog, now is the time to consider it.

Owned by Google, Blogger is one such free publishing platform that offers all the necessary tools for effective blogging. The platform is extremely popular and very easy to use.

Another popular platform for blogging which is available to the public is WordPress. The fundamentals are free, with additional hosting or themes available through either WordPress or partners.

Already have a blog? Why not create a mobile-friendly version for free using Mofuse “in 5 seconds”. Simply signup and setup your feed, and receive an alternative address for your blog which makes mobile access much easier.

Social Networking Profiles

If you’d like to secure more spots on the SERPs, social networking platforms are also easy and free to use. 

LinkedIn is an extremely popular and free social networking service provider, focusing on business networking. The profiles allow for profile picture, a short bio and outgoing link and contact details.

LookupPage also offer great profiles for increased search engine visibility. With free and premium profiles, LookupPage allows for personalised profiles, traffic analysis and more, while the premium accounts guarantee a top result on the SERPs and unique domain name.

Remember that LookupPage is the only services that guarantees your presence on Google’s 1st page – register now.

Facebook Vanity URLs for Personal Branding

Facebook differs from many of the other social networking sites out there due to the focus on creating a community of your ‘real’ friends and connections, rather than online characters with obscure usernames and identities.

This focus on authenticity helped Facebook become the success it is today, but one feature was always lacking from the service: Unique and memorable URLs.

Facebook is one of modern personal branding specialist’s most valuable tools, but the generated URLs are neither easy to remember or distribute. On MySpace or Twitter users can choose their own username and URL, many people opted to use these tools as a result.

But now, the social networking giant invites users to create their own URLs, which makes finding your page much easier.

Setting Up Your Facebook Vanity URL

The optional vanity URL feature was made available on June 13, 2009. Now it’s up to you to make your profile or fan page easier to find and more memorable than a string of random characters.

Set up your Facebook username now to make your profile, fan page or group more user-friendly.

Facebook vanity URL guidelines:

• Username must be unique.
• Must be a minimum of five characters.
• URLs can only contain alpha-numeric (Romanised) characters and full-stops.
• Can’t be changed once set.

Linkbait: What is it and how can it help build your online presence?

Linkbait is content which is created in the hopes that others will enjoy it and link back to your site. The process involves creating content which others would find valuable and link through to on their own websites or even submit to a social bookmarking or article syndication site.

Why is linkbait good for your online presence? Well, as long as the links which result from it don’t come from a questionable source, incoming links add credibility to your content in the eyes of search engine spiders. Additional links can also mean more traffic from users who stumbled across the link to your site.

How should you go about linkbaiting?

While the principles of linkbaiting should be a natural part of any content creation process, there are specific ways of creating content specifically to attract attention.

Your personal branding goals and industry niche should give you an idea of what angle to take to persuade others to link to your content and here are some pointers to help:

• Provide something new or unique.
• The more generous you are with valuable content, the more readers will enjoy it.
• Be humorous, topical or thought provoking.
• Supply the content which your audience is searching for (with the help of a bit of keyword research).
• Incentives are effective linkbait, but remember to include valuable content for the reader, not just incentives for those that link to you.
• Be controversial or engage in debate by posing questions and interacting via your comments section.
• Encourage linking. Make it easy to share, provide favicons for easy linking or even the optimised link code.

Personal Branding Nightmares: Former US Senator Rick Santorum

We often look at how the internet can aid your personal branding efforts or turn the average Joe into a worldwide sensation.

There is however, a dark side – one to be monitored and avoided if at all possible. To highlight this dark side, we’ll be looking at various personal branding nightmares over the next few months and we’ve chosen to start with a really extreme and well known example: Rick Santorum.

Rick Santorum is a former US Senator and a Republican known for his conservative ideals and outspoken disposition, especially on homosexuality, same sex marriages and religion.

Not shy of the spotlight, Santorum has published many periodicals, has a column in the Philadelphia Inquirer titled "The Elephant in the Room" and is a contributor to Fox News.

Rick Santorum’s Online Identity

Santorum’s personal branding has changed over the years, and has also embraced social networking as a platform to publish his writings and solidify his personal branding. His Facebook fan page has over 5 000 followers and includes articles ‘From the Desk of Rick Santorum’ as well as details on his public speaking appearances. But of the 119 Facebook search results, it’s evident that there are many anti-Santorum supporters online – not to mention the amount of negative commentary on Twitter.

His Google CV also produces a mix of good and bad publicity. The Wikipedia entry is the topped ranked result. But contrasting this is another Wikipedia entry for the term “Santorum”.

Created by American writer, Dan Savage, in an effort to ‘Google bomb’ Santorum’s SERP, the term is a neologism for the by-product of sexual acts which Santorum himself condemned. The openly-homosexual journalist urged the public to adopt the term, and use it online to ‘hijack’ the search results for the name Rick Santorum.His Google CV also features results for books written by Rick Santorum, flanked by denigrating content – or even angry commentary on legitimate Santorum related stories.

Although the politician could definitely benefit from online reputation management, the sheer volume of bad publicity would make the management extremely difficult.

But, as most of the derogatory instances on his Google CV are at least a year or two old, Rick Santorum could improve his personal branding with a LookupPage profile (which would push some of the negative results down) and some serious positive publicity.

Personal Branding and Business Vulnerability

Personal branding can work wonders for a business as it can create an approachable spokesman or ambassador with which consumers can interact.

Ashton Kutcher, noted as the most followed user on Twitter with over 2.3 million followers, is a prime example of the effect personal branding can have on a business – even an unofficial endorsement.

"I found it astonishing that one person can actually have as big of a voice online as what an entire media company can on Twitter" said Ashton Kutcher in one of his many videos.

The American actor made headlines months ago by challenging CNN.com to a race to 1 million Twitter followers, with others like Oprah Winfrey also accepting the challenge.

Kutcher went on to say, “If I beat CNN to 1 million viewers, then I would ding-dong ditch Ted Turner”.

The micro-blogging funny man volunteered to donate $10 000 towards the fight against malaria if he won. Others, like Oprah publicly matched his contributions regardless of the outcome of the race.

Holding the Business Hostage

This publicity was great for Twitter, as millions flocked the service after hearing about it on the news and in blogs and signed up in order to hear what their favourite celebrities have to say in a casual capacity.

But, being the poster boy for the service, Kutcher caused a ruckus again when rumours surfaced that Twitter had given the green light to the production of a reality TV game show in which users would track down celebrities via their Twitter feed. He and other public figures threatened to abandon the service if it went ahead with the production. Consumer generated media has the potential to bite back if not very carefully monitored!

While a large percentage of Twitter adoption rates can be attributed to Kutcher, Larry King and Oprah Winfrey, it’s interesting to see how these celebrities can cause a stir in the hopes that the public will leave with them if  things became a little too personal – leaving the service extremely vulnerable.

"It's all fun and games until somebody gets stalked," stated one of Kutcher’s tweets.