[MUSIC] In the last lesson, I discussed some tips for building your professional presence on a website. Things like not using advertising on your page, using your name for search engine optimization, and building your portfolio. This is the last lesson under the theme of building your professional brand, and we discussed the importance of having your own professional website. This might seem like a daunting task, for this lesson, I want to discuss where you should begin to improve the content. A site of your own, establishes your authority. If you have your own website and it has actually beneficial and interesting content on it, you come across as a grown up, you come across as something very different in the sea of job seekers so it really does help you stand out. And in the 21st century you will probably not going to find a job that you're going to keep for 30 years. Having your own site gives you a constant presence as a smart, capable professional. And it's value is going to continue to increase over time. So your assignment for this lesson. If you don't have a website that's on your own domain, that is a reasonably professional domain names, so not minecraft hacker 99 or something crazy like that. Something reasonably professional, it doesn't have to be stuffy, but it shouldn't be unprofessional. If you don't have a site in your own domain, go get one set up. Self-hosted WordPress is a great way to go if you are somewhat technical, because it gives you the most freedom, and the fewest restrictions. If that's seeming like a big hurdle and not seeming like it's going to get done, you can go ahead and go to WordPress.com. You can go to any other site you want, as long as you can use your own domain name to put your site on. And by the way, if you do have a site on Word Press, and frankly if you have a site on any platform, it's a very smart idea to spend a little bit of money on site monitoring for your site, to make sure that the site is not compromised by hackers. And if it is compromised by hackers, that you can get it cleaned up. So, there are site monitoring services out there that are very good. And I would just Google WordPress site monitoring and find a good provider. Should be, it'll probably be less than $100 a year. It is a really good investment in your professionalism. Nothing makes you look worse than to have your site hacked and you have weird, creepy graffiti marring your homepage. And creepy ads and malware. And if you are not a service, it's very tricky to get those sites cleaned up because these guys have all kinds of crazy little tech things that they do and exploitations that they do. It's really worth the investment just to not after worry about it. Now if you do have a website, first of all, awesome, A plus. Go take a look at it with some fresh eyes, and put yourself in the shoes of a potential employer of an organization that might want to work with you, or a client who might want to hire you as a freelancer so how does your profile picture look? How does your bio look? Is everything professional without being boring or stuffy? And if it is boring and stuffy there can be how you can liven things up. You might add something interesting from your personal life that colleagues would like to know about you. Also, a great time to add some writing that you're proud of. Really, writing of any kind is great. Obviously, writing with some kind of commercial intent, even better. And I'm going to go ahead and give you a link to an article I wrote about how to write an about page. That'll help you make sure that that section of your website is doing what it needs to be doing. So, that's it for today. This exercise actually does not have you take you more than 15 minutes to get set up. And it's not particularly expensive but this really are career investment. This is going to take you a lot farther than the nice suit that you bought to interviews in or you know, the nice pen right that you got for graduation that you pull out when you're doing interviews to make yourself look cool. Having a website of your own, on your own domain name is really the cornerstone of a content professional and it's going to be the foundation for a lot of other cool things you could do. So, don't let it intimidate you. It's very easy, lots of great tools now.
