If you’re trying to find an internship or a job, you need to have a visible (and more importantly, easy to find) presence on the Internet.
To do this, you need to make sure your information is getting to the top of the search engine results. One fairly easy way you can beef up your online presence is to buy a domain name. With this special link, you can buy up to 5 domain names from GoDaddy for only $7.49 each – just click this link.
You typically pay for a domain name on a yearly basis, which costs anywhere between $10 and $20 (or $7.49!). This could change based on how many domain names you want to register. If you already have a blog on websites like WordPress or Blogger, you can buy your domain name through their websites – but its more expensive than through our link.
For those of you with common names (Ex: Tom Smith), it’s important to add some sort of unique feature to your name that you can market your personal brand around. Maybe you could add an underscore or period to your name — or even create a play on words. For example, my friend Morgan Reid couldn’t get a domain with her name, as it was already taken. So she made a pun with her name — Reidmore (read more, get it?). While it’s not her full name, it stands out and can be easily found through search engines.
For information on purchasing a domain name from WordPress, click here. For more information on purchasing a domain name through Blogger, click here. Want to try something different? Blogger has a list of different companies you can buy domain names from here.
Want to amp up your online presence but don’t want to buy a domain quite yet? Here are some other tips:
- Change your social media account names to represent your actual name. For example, I changed my Twitter name from a nickname to my actual name.
- Create a professional email account for yourself through a free email service like Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail. This is the email address you’ll put on your resume and forward to all of your prospective employers. If you’re lucky, you might be able to get your name as your username!
- Make some of your social media accounts public (unless you’ve got some unruly content on there). Feel free to pick and choose which accounts are public and which are not, but some of them should be public. If an employer can’t access any of your accounts, he or she will start to wonder what you’ve got to hide.
So what are you waiting for? Pick up your domain name today from GoDaddy for only $7.49 – that’s the average price of a sandwich and you will be on your way to potentially a better job, sweeter looking resume or maybe onto building your very own website.
