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Your Online Profile - YOP

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Written by Amine Hambaba

Sunday, 01 July 2007

The internet is becoming a smaller world terms of finding and managing information. Major improvements in publishing content easily such as blogs (even mirco-blogs) and social networks have made it much easier for anyone to publish content in a short period of time. The growth in such content can be seen in the massive expansion of the “blogosphere” and the presence of a wise array of social networks. Also, with the website syndication such as RSS (Really Simple Syndication), ATOM, and others becoming more popular and widely used, great innovations in managing such great content in simple formats literally brings the World Wide Web (WWW) to your desktop. With any simple Feed reader such as Google Reader, Microsoft Outlook, etc, you will never have to browse a website again. Well that's great you say. What does it matter?

Based on my observations of the evolution of the internet, “unique content” is becoming more sought after. “Unique content” is information that can't be easily reproduced or created by web entities such as: your ideas, life experiences, and presentation. Such content is more attractive when compared to the dull reproduction of various media all over the web. This is, perhaps, the main characteristic to the success of blogs in that field. Web 2.0 is currently becoming a big producer in “unique content” and taking advantage of the moment by monetizing it mainly through advertisement revenues. I completely agree with this structure, especially since they offer free services. But what is the limit set in terms of how much they monetize on my content? Recently, upon a quick search on google of my name, I found search results to my account on a couple of social networks, such as Linkedin, the websites are social networks that published a public directory of their members. Thankfully, I was able to remove my public profile on the sites with a quick change of my profile options.

This scenario brought to my attention the importance of “unique content” and how it can be easily used as a source of traffic to a website. Basically, this creates an avenue for revenue. Why let someone else monetize on your unique content? You can take advantage of online applications and create “Your Online Profile” (YOP). The following are few steps to get started.

Register a domain name
Register a domain name that represents you or your family such as your own name or family name. The first step in being represented on the WWW and probably the easiest. Just register with a register such as GoDaddy.

Create a Website
The number of websites that offer websites are numerous, but one that stands out from the competition is Google Pages. A couple of reasons are the options available, i.e. you can have you domain name registered with Google Pages, and no forced advertisement.

Search your name
Perform searches on a few top search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Live) for search terms that relate to specifically (i.e. name, writing, etc.) and monitor where and how the information is being published.

This information is a great foundation for building YOP. I will keep you posted. What do you think about this idea?