Are You Building Doors to Nowhere?
doors to nowhere aren't much help
Actions to be avoided include:
- Developing your presence where you know or suspect no one is paying attention
- Not researching good venues to post comments related to the subject of your work
As a creative individual expressing yourself for your living you must have your own web site.
My advice is to have more than one. This gives you a bigger foot print from the point of view of search engines.
You should always have your own domain registered as your own name or some variant of your name. People who recognize you professionally by your name or some stage name should be able to just use www.yourname.com and find you. Always go for the .com domain first. You can add other suffixes, but the .com is expected.
Keep different kinds of niche or specific content separated and on its own domain. It helps not to confuse readers.
In my case, I talk about creativity and marketing here, charmfx.com, and include mentions that are more related to my own work or personal experiences on wilhaslup.com.
The wilhaslup.com domain actually incorporates that blog within the Tumblr community. I’ve detailed how I did this here – “Crossing boundaries with your web site” which encourages browsing by a large community of users who have blogs there.
Every domain you own should have a method of contact and links to your various other social network accounts. It isn’t necessary that each domain have links to every social account you have, but twitter, facebook & YouTube are necessities. The facebook destination you use for your work should be a public profile page, not your personal profile. Facebook changed their terms last year and no longer allow you to do business for profit on your personal profile.
Each domain you’re running should have it’s own social accounts also. Sometimes domains can have crossover content, but mostly you’re trying to build followings around specific subjects and allow readers to discover your other sites via links or doing web searches on their own. You may include links to your various sites in a general way on each one which provides a way for readers to find them.
You must give people a single site to find you via all the content you may be posting on social sites or in storefront sites. You should have control over both the domain names you register for these sites and the server they run on. You never know when storefront services, portfolio sites or journaling sites may change their terms. Etsy, ArtFire & Flickr are great, but things can change and you don’t want to have to reinvent your web universe if they do.
You don’t want to cultivate an audience to a web destination and then have to rebuild it. Get your own.
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