If you cannot be discovered (online), you don’t exist

Max Kalehoff, the VP of Marketing at Clickable, who writes the excellent AttentionMax blog, had a great post yesterday on the importance of your online presence. As I have the kind of robust online presence about which he speaks, I believe it is ideal for me to discuss his post, its advice and conclusion.

Max’s post states and I agree. “A lack of personal optimization can be a serious disadvantage in a down economy. With unemployment rising, job seekers who are highly visible to employers have the upper hand. Those who are not discoverable don’t exist. No wonder LinkedIn is seeing record traffic and a surge in interpersonal recommendations.”

However, Max goes on to say that the day of personal online optimization has not yet arrived.

Digital Personal Optimization: When?

So begs the question: When will serious digital personal optimization services become widely available? There is a mature industry of services firms and software that aid businesses in their attempts to optimize, but there’s very little that’s compelling or affordable for individuals.

I beg to differ, Max. It is compelling and affordable, but poorly understood. This is why Jill Konrath is working with me on an initiative for professional job seekers entitled Get Back to Work Faster — How to Use Job Creation Techniques to Take control and Win. We’re going to teach professionals how to do it.

This will soon be a book, ebook, website and social network. While these tools will be free (except the book) and teach you how to do it, you have to wait till mid April for them to be completed.

Please let me explain how affordable and compelling a personal online optimization strategy can be. Here is the process I used. Click the hyperlinks for live examples.

Create a personal website. Not nearly as hard as you might think. Use good blog software like WordPress.com or Typepad.com and use Pages rather than Posts. Total cost: $30 a year to eliminate ads.
Write a thought leadership blog. Use the same blog software and use Posts rather than Pages. Total cost: Free
Create a strong Linkedin profile. Find an expert such as Patrick O’Malley and review his online posts on how to do it. Total cost: Free, plus the $15 a month or so Linkedin charges.
Sign up for Twitter and start using it. Total cost: Free
Sign up for Facebook and start using it. Total cost: Free
Optional: Develop your own brand. Register a domain at GoDaddy or Name.com. Point that domain to you.
For instance, my niche is sales and marketing leadership — growing revenue. This is highly competitive and stressful. So my brand is this: I am the Fearless Competitor. The video on the home page of my website allows me to talk directly to the hiring manager about my brand. “After all, wouldn’t you like to be fearless?” The brand is a recurring theme throughout everything that I do.

The goal of this blog post is not to teach you how to do it, but mere to illustrate that it is possible and cost-effective, once you know how.

I want to also touch on the age question. Many experienced professionals think websites, blogs, Twitter and Facebook are for the 20-30 crowd — and they are incapable of doing it. Untrue. I am 49 years of age (Granted, I have the energy level of a 29 year old.) but I’ve done it all and you can too. Age is an excuse — nothing more.

I wish I could share my training videos, the book, etc. right now, but I cannot. Jill Konrath is working very hard on it. It will be out in 4-5 weeks. Stay tuned.

For companies looking for best practices in b2b lead generation who wish to improve the way they acquire new customers, Find New Customers is the place to go. CSO Insights says companies need to improve the way they generate leads and implement processes for business to business lead generation.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is a demand generation expert and sales leader, as well as the President of Find New Customers, alead generation company, who helps businesses create lead generation campaigns and continually publishes the best lead generation ideas, so his readers can determine the best lead generation strategy to find new customers. He can be reached at (516) 284-4930 or mailto:[email protected].

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One response to “If you cannot be discovered (online), you don’t exist”

Thanks for the shout-out, Jeff. There are some services and initiatives, like your own. But I still don’t think they’re mainstream. Personal digital optimization is not mainstream yet, but it will be in a matter of years.