Everyone wants to be seen and heard online, but your career or business prospects (or both) depend on it. You can’t afford to be boxed out by competitors with similar names or titles or professional strengths.
Rest assured, you won’t — but you have to do something about it, and now. You need to establish a presence on as many high-profile web properties as you can.
Like any big project, it’s fine to tackle this one in steps. Let’s set a goal of creating or improving your presence on five properties to start. Read on to learn what they are and why they’re important.
1. LinkedIn
You knew this one was coming. We don’t need to go into detail about why an active LinkedIn presence is important to your professional prospects; that should be obvious. But it is important to call out an often-overlooked fact about LinkedIn: Its pages rank very high in search results. Few websites are as helpful to one’s online visibility.
2. Inc
Inc is a content-rich resource for business owners, professionals, and the general public alike. While its high-quality content portal deserves praise, it’s Inc’s profiles that should really catch your eye. As shown by this Inc profile for Daniella Rand, a San Francisco wealth manager, it’s difficult to imagine a better venue for telling one’s professional story: succinct, positive, and associated with a domain that receives millions of unique visitors every month.
3. Medium
On the subject of content portals, let’s give a nod to Medium, arguably the world’s most popular longform blogging platform. Thanks to its high search visibility and easy-to-use publishing tools, Medium can easily replace your old-fashioned website blog, which probably doesn’t get much traffic anyway.
4. Twitter
Twitter is technically a social media platform, not a business directory or professional resource. However, it’s a bit unique among social media sites (other than LinkedIn, of course) for two reasons.
One, Twitter is disproportionately populated by the sorts of influencers and decision-makers your online presence needs to reach. You can’t afford not to have an active presence here.
Two, like the other properties on this list, the Twitter domain has extremely high authority. It’s not quite an automatic first-page hit in your exact-match search results, but only because nothing is. Twitter is about as close as it gets.
5. Crunchbase
Never heard of it? No sweat. Crunchbase’s importance far exceeds its name recognition. This is the quintessential business directory, a vital (and SEO-friendly) place to tell your personal and professional story and connect with others.
There’s Not a Minute to Waste
Right now — this very moment — your competitors are working to erode your competitive advantage online. You might not know who these people are or even consider them competitors. But they’re working all the same, doing whatever they can to create a web presence that’s more noticeable and appealing and visible than yours.
They’ll succeed, too, if you let them.
You won’t let them, though. Will you? It’s not as if you don’t know what needs to be done. We’ve discussed six high-profile web properties that will immediately boost your online visibility if and when you claim your rightful presence on them. All that’s left to do is, well, claim that presence.
There’s not a minute to waste. Here’s to boxing out the competition where it matters most.
