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Virtual business card personal branding site

If you’re looking for a nice place to consolidate the different points of your online presence, you may what to look at Card.ly. I read about it today and immediately set up a profile. It’s actually similar to the profile you can create on Google (see this post). You have done your Google profile, haven’t you???

Here’s my card.ly profile:

card.ly

Why would I want to do this?

Funny you should ask – you should always ask this question before you listen to any cockamamie advice, even from me. First, if you’re going to do anything for a profile, do Google. That gives you a free ad on the first page of a Google search of your name. But Google Profiles aren’t as easy to set up as card.ly, and they’re pretty ugly in comparison. So if you want to show people that you “get it,” you’ll do both. The visual impact of card.ly is striking – there you are with icons for all your social networking sites, and all you have to do is click on the ones you use and provide a username (they don’t need your password).

One thing this does for me is to promote some of the sharing sites that most people don’t know about. I frequently share items in Google Reader – for those of you in the support groups I’m in, I usually post a message to the appropriate Yahoo group. But I’m actually flagging much more than I post on Yahoo, and if you think I’m a good filter for you, it’s a good way for you to learn fast by letting me pass along the most important (for you) articles to read.

It remains to be seen how much this will help your Google and Bing profiles. In my opinion, you need to be thinking about both of those, especially if Microsoft actually does a search deal with Yahoo. Google still has a commanding lead in search, but some people are saying that a MS/Yahoo alliance would give them almost 1/3 of the search market – so you’d better be watching your presence there as well.

Posted in Personal branding.

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