Building your online presence is easy and affordable. If you offer services, this increases clients awareness and positively affect your credibility. From personal perspective, this enhances your online image that is very important for your career.
All you need is a website with you custom domain name (e.g., mohamadkarbi.com) and a professional email using this domain (e.g., contact@mohamadkarbi.com)
Domain
It starts here. Domain names are very affordable nowadays. If you don’t have a domain yet, check this post about how to choose your domain name.
Website
You need a website with some details about you and to show your portfolio (e.g., writings, photography, …). WordPress is a very good choice. Further, WordPress offers a domain usually… You always have an option of going into self hosting; read this post first.
Using free email services such Gmail, Outlook, or Yahoo is unprofessional. You need a email connected to your domain. (check this post)
Other related points
Up to here, things are fine and I guess they are enough. However, if you’re willing to pay more, you can also have your own photography and files connected to your domain too. While there are WordPress plugins doing this, I found them difficult and not as required.
SmugMug
With Smugmug (Adobe Portfolio is similar), you can use your domain with their service. So, people will visit your gallery as part of your domain. They are also sharing your domain when they share your pictures/videos. (check this post)
Nextcloud
When you share a file from Google drive, people receive an email from Google telling them about the shared file/link. With Nextcloud, people will receive an email from your domain with a link to your file under your domain. (check this post)
Search Engines & Social Media
This topic is not intended here but I can’t skip it. As we all already know, continuous posting to social media and optimized submission to search engines are important factors in increasing awareness of your name/work. You may refer to this post for further details.
The above points are mainly from personal point of view not for companies of sure. Have I missed any thing? Do you use any of the above techniques?
Hi, Mohamad. David and I have been talking. We’re putting some ideas together that we’ll send soon. Nice post.
Thanks Troy for all your kind efforts to support this humble site. I’m very glad that you like this post too 🙂
I use everything on this list except for SmugMug and Nextcloud.
Thank you, Mark, for the note. They are enough for sure. NextCloud and SmugMug (or Adobe Portfolio) are somehow expensive and might not be easy to manage. I’m myself thinking of stopping them for saving purposes.