Build the Mountain: Your Online Professional Brand

So they’ll come; that’s why.

“If the mountain won’t come to you, go to the mountain,” Mohammed said, paraphrased. It’s a useful, humble approach to much in life, including your career. But balance is another useful concept in life, of which career is a part, and you want your targets coming to your mountain just as often as you’re going to theirs. You want your target audiences to say, “I need to go to the mountain,” too. And you want them to see your online professional brand as one of those mountains they must go to.

Is this selfish? Well, maybe a little, but the Web is filled with mountains, each attracting and going to other mountains in tandem and concurrently; the end result is even and balanced.

Say, for instance, you’ve worked a while on your LinkedIn profile. It’s solid, filled with keywords designed not only to attract the attention of well-known search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo!, but also to drop your name onto the computer screen of anyone searching your areas of expertise via LinkedIn’s internal search tool. Those are mountains coming to your mountain, of which your LinkedIn profile is a part.

But let’s say you want to bring your mountain, or an aspect of it, to an employer’s mountain—or to another kind of mountain, such as a community of likeminded professionals debating and discussing ideas relevant to your career. You can do these things, too.

Technology available today enables you, with your #CareerGravity, to use your social media footprint to apply for a job. A LinkedIn functionality, for instance, allows job seekers to submit their profiles as curricula vitae or resumes when applying for jobs at organizations whose career websites support and have integrated LinkedIn’s button for this. That’s one way. Another way to bring your online professional brand, or mountain, to another online mountain, is to participate in Twitter chats, where professionals of like or intersecting interests congregate to talk shop. Participate. There, share links that take other participants to your online destinations representing your brand. Just be sure to project authenticity. The best self-promoters don’t really promote; they engage and interact.

To get the career you want, all you need is an online footprint that properly and accurately reflects the professional brand you want to convey. All you need is #CareerGravity. If you’re interested in learning how to put together a viable online footprint for these purposes, sign up with #CareerGravity and, in return, receive a complimentary copy of the #CareerGravity Blueprint.