Social networking and an online presence can propel your job search. If you already have a blog, adding your social media resume creates a powerful platform for making others aware of your skills. If you don’t have your own blog yet, or your own personal URL you are willing to make toward expanding your social networking efforts. A blog should to be regularly updated and kept ‘fresh’ at least once per week, but preferably daily or at least numerous times per week. This doesn’t mean hours of work-just a brief period of time for an update. That might mean a couple of paragraphs of fresh content around your area of expertise-perhaps some views on your industry, commentary around new products, a fresh opinion on some business aspect, and so forth. Adding something of value to the community in which you would like to be gainfully employed can be a tremendous advantage when it comes to your job search.

If you haven’t yet done so, it is highly recommended that you register your name in the form of your own URL and with the “.com” extension ideally. Registration is easy and inexpensive at one of many domain name registrars (a fancy name for a place to ‘register’ your own name/URL). GoDaddy is just one popular and cost-effective option. As of this writing, one domain name will cost approximately $10 per year. Simply visit one of these domain registration sites and do a lookup for it in the search box tool to make sure no one else with the same name already “owns” it. If the name you’d like is taken, consider one of several related suggestions the registrar company might offer that would still contain your name.com in the URL.

Search engines like Google and Yahoo are more likely to list such a Web site when people do a search on your name because they assume that sites with such addresses are highly relevant to the person doing the search. So acquire it right away. It’s also important to remember that you will need to re-register one year later and for every year after that. Otherwise someone with the same name can grab “your” URL out from underneath you, leaving you with a bit of a problem in finding/choosing a new URL name.