Personal branding – set up your free Google profile now!

Google has just started showing Google profiles at the bottom of name searches. If you have a Google account, it’s really easy to set up a profile at http://google.com/profiles.

You’ll go directly to your profile if you’re logged into Google. If you don’t have an account, the link will take you to a page where you can set one up. Google will use the same name as your GMail account uses, so pick wisely.

You have options about what you allow other people to see. For example, you can hide your email address.

This is a good place to put the other sites you want people to see: your website, your blog, your LinkedIn profile – anything you want. Consider adding your most important social networking sites, perhaps Facebook and Twitter.

Easy to do, quick, and if you’re one of the 4 people with your name Google picks to highlight, it’s like free advertising. Plus, it’s on the first Google results page. One oddity I noted – don’t know if it was just an isolated incident – I had to put my name in quotes.  A Google search of “Walter Feigenson” yielded these results, while the Google profile was absent for Walter Feigenson.

Well, OK, another weirdness. I don’t have a MySpace account, and I certainly wouldn’t put Classmates at the top of my social networking sites. Looks like you don’t have any control over that, but if you click on my name, it takes you to a profile page that has the sites I added, like Twitter and my Google Reader shares.