A friend of mine has just finished some course to do with psychology and driver behaviour and she is wondering how she can market herself with these new skills or face the daunting prospect of forgetting about building a career in this field and train to become a primary school teacher. It must a common dilemma for people who do not have marketing skills or do not have friends or former colleagues who they can call on for help. But the low-cost route using some of the new social media services, although it is financially attractive, has its pitfalls.
Let’s make one thing clear, social sites are just that – social. They are for friends, clubs, associations etc to share information, they are not for business. Let’s go through some of the reasons why.
1: Flexibility. From a design point of view you are very limited. I know Tumblr has themes and some of them are very good, but compared to a conventional site you are stymied.
2: Availability. While I was researching this post I was using Tumblr as an example but kept getting this:
Quite simply, if you rely on free services you have to accept the limitations and if this means downtime, tough! With a paid for professional host you get a pretty much guaranteed percentage uptime and normally that is in the high nineties – you get what you pay for.
3: Search engine optimisation:
Back in the early days of the web you could slap up a page in hand crafted HTML and virtually be assured of getting some coverage on the likes of search engines like Yahoo and Google. Now? Forget it, the ball game has changed. The SEO picture has gone beyond simple meta tags, descriptions, keywords and the like.
4: They just look unprofessional! Nuff said.
So what to do? This is the advice I am going to give my friend and anyone else who has just come out of education and wants to market themselves over the net and who is a total novice to web site set up.
Find a web host that will enable you to auto-setup the blogging platform WordPress as your front end. If you go down the route of getting someone to set up your web site you will probably end up paying them to update it. With WordPress you can change the content every day yourself if that is what you want. Auto-set up may be sneered at by some web professionals but you get your presence established in minutes.
WordPress has many themes, free and paid for, that will quickly establish a professional look. There are also some themes such as Atahualpa (free) and Thesis (paid for) that are SEO optimised. WordPress also has a number of great plugs ins such as Google XML Sitemaps and All In One SEO Pack that will help you gain better ratings on search engines.
Take your time thinking about a theme and stick with it. Don’t do what I did and go from a freebie theme to Thesis after six months. You need to maintain a consolidated image.
You can use your WordPress front end as a normal website and not as a blog – but hey, why not blog. You have skills, expertise and experience in your field, why not blow your own trumpet.
Let’s briefly look at cost. Free is free but has a lot against it. To get a web hosting package with domain name and auto-set up for WordPress will cost around $80; going for the power of Thesis will add another $70; and investment in a mail service such as Aweber will cost around $19 a month.
Go for it.
Related posts:
