Madison Who’s Who Blog

Business referrals generated via your business blog are some of the most compelling reasons for building your online brand. Be you part of a corporate organization or a small businessman or a solo freelancer, gaining respect for your expertise and recognition as a “thought leader” in your field is almost mandatory at this stage of the game.

You are expected to have an online presence and the site that represents you is your online wardrobe, so to speak. In other words, just as you wouldn’t attend a peer networking event disheveled and unprepared, your site needs to look like a candidate for GQ in appearance with content of like caliber.

Chris Garrett of ChrisG.com offers advice on making your site appealing and relevant to your target audience. Here are some excerpts, follow the link below for the full treatment.

• Photography - Shrink down the image and one element is always visible. Big, attractive, photographs. People are hard wired to be attracted to faces…
• Lead with benefits - At first glance the visitor needs to know what is in it for them….
• Above the fold - You can see clearly where the newspaper is folded. What is visible? How do they communicate? The fold on a computer screen is the part where you would have to scroll to see any more…..
• Compelling headlines - … What headlines do you provide visitors? Are they compelling or confusing?
• Content first, advertising second - No adverts on the covers. Look inside and the content is given priority. The way it should be.
• Phrasing - Check out the wording. No PHD words here. No lazy words either. Active, interesting, vibrant, key words that jump out….

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Effective global networking requires name recognition. If Googling your name produces millions of results, none leading to you, does it really matter? According to the leading experts, it certainly does. As more and more employers and head hunters use search engines to find out more about possible job candidates, the prominence of your name in a search becomes a factor in competing for positions and contracts.

“In the age of Google, being special increasingly requires standing out from the crowd online. Many people aspire for themselves — or their offspring — to command prominent placement in the top few links on search engines or social networking sites’ member lookup functions..”

Lest you think it nonsense, perhaps you’d be surprised to learn that parents are now Googling a variety of names when choosing one for their baby in order to determine what name is likely to surface to the top in Google.

“…when Ms. Wilson, now 32, was pregnant with her first child, she ran every baby name she and her husband, Justin, considered through Google to make sure her baby wouldn’t be born unsearchable. Her top choice: Kohler, an old family name that had the key, rare distinction of being uncommon on the Web when paired with Wilson. “Justin and I wanted our son’s name to be as special as he is”, she explains.”
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In order to stand out on Google, professionals are seeking out various services that, for a monthly fee, will promote an individual’s profile or blog to appear at the top of search engine results. One freelancer emerging from a corporate identity into her own field gladly makes use of available services, saying “If you’re not found in search results, people start to wonder why.”

The entrepreneur and the freelancer and those working out of their home haven’t the benefit of walking into the next office, throwing their feet on the desk and bouncing ideas off a colleague for feedback.

Problems have to be approached solo and the day’s business has to handled as if there were no distractions. Procrastination has to be thwarted and goals have to be met. Peer to peer networking serves well for leads and mentoring but the day to day issues are up to the individual. So with no one to brainstorm with how do you handle problem solving.

Steve Pavlina has 33 suggestions (the first 7 listed below)  based on applying a heuristic approach. You may not solve the problem, but you will be living in solutions and not paralysis. The idea is to keep in motion.

“As you take action you begin to explore the solution space, which deepens your understanding of the problem. As you gain knowledge about the problem, you can make course corrections along the way, gradually improving your chances of finding a solution.”

1. Nuke it! The most efficient way to get through a task is to delete it. If it doesn’t need to be done, get it off your to do list.
2. Daily goals. Without a clear focus, it’s too easy to succumb to distractions. Set targets for each day in advance. Decide what you’ll do; then do it.
3. Worst first. To defeat procrastination learn to tackle your most unpleasant task first thing in the morning instead of delaying it until later in the day. This small victory will set the tone for a very productive day.
4. Peak times. Identify your peak cycles of productivity, and schedule your most important tasks for those times. Work on minor tasks during your non-peak times.
5. No-comm zones. Allocate uninterruptible blocks of time for solo work where you must concentrate. Schedule light, interruptible tasks for your open-comm periods and more challenging projects for your no-comm periods.
6. Mini-milestones. When you begin a task, identify the target you must reach before you can stop working. For example, when working on a book, you could decide not to get up until you’ve written at least 1000 words. Hit your target no matter what.
7. Timeboxing. Give yourself a fixed time period, like 30 minutes, to make a dent in a task. Don’t worry about how far you get. Just put in the time. See Timeboxing for more.

“Free agents quickly realized that in the traditional world, they were silently accepting an architecture of work customs and social mores that should have crumbled long ago under the weight of its own absurdity. From infighting and office politics to bosses pitting employees against one another to colleagues who don’t pull their weight, most workplaces are a study in dysfunction.”

If you are a freelancer, consultant, or any type of entrepreneur, you can define yourself as a free agent. You have rejected the orthodox, tradition clad model of earning a living and are determined to carve your own niche. And you hardly are alone. You are joined by an entire global network of free agents who have forsworn the corporate trap.

“If we add up the self-employed, the independent contractors, the temps — a working definition of the population of Free Agent Nation — we end up with more than 16% of the American workforce: roughly 25 million free agents in the United States, people who move from project to project and who work on their own, sometimes for months, sometimes for days.”
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Free agents represent a philosophy that was impossible for their parent’s generation to adopt. Without the Internet, only lonely artists were trying to carve a career outside the security net provided by a corporate position. Today’s professionals are gladly creating their own security and defining work as a fun an integral component in their life, not a 9 to 5 drudge that demands sacrificing identity or passion.