Site Description

As web applications and social networks continue to grow and become mainstream, more and more employers are using them and Google to scan candidates. It’s easy to have questionable content posted either on one of your accounts or one belonging to your friends. Often that questionable content is enough to remove you from consideration for a job.

Luckily, the fellas over at Brand-Yourself.com have come up with a service to combat that problem. Their website takes an aggressive approach towards improving your online presence by helping you create content that reflects a better side than that Facebook photo of you doing a twelve foot beer bong in college. How exactly that’s done is pretty impressive. Equally impressive is how well they explain their service. They have a video that shows the process in detail and it’s so good I decided to save myself some time and post it below.

About Brand-Yourself.com

The Brand-Yourself team, led by Pete Kistler, is compiled of Syracuse University students and recent graduates. They joined together with the intention of designing “tools to establish, track, manage and improve our web presence.” The result is a web service that is effective and simple to use. They have already garnered numerous awards and acknowledgements including a nomination as one of five finalists for Entrepreneur Magazines 2009 College Entrepreneur of the Year.

What I Liked

This website will only continue to gain momentum as it becomes evident that your internet footprint can be a critical factor in whether or not you get a job. I like that Pete and company have found an untapped need and are well on their way toward servicing it. When the rest of the world catches up they’ll have a great jump on the competition.

The part that I’m most impressed with is the ease of use. Not everyone has the technical skills necessary to start a webpage on their own. With Brand-Yourself you don’t need to do so. Anyone with the basic skills to write an email or create a Word document can excel using the tools offered at Brand-Yourself. The interface is a clone of WordPress without the need for servers and hosting plans. The result is a well-crafted webpage that reflects the user in a professional light.

A number of high quality tools are available for your use once you sign up for an account. The Web Presence Breakdown organizes your online appearance by finding your social networking accounts and linking them together. This allows you to easily monitor how they look to a potential employer from one simple location. The Breadcrumb Tracker collects all the digital snippets that are associated with you online. If someone’s left a comment about you somewhere, the Breadcrumb Tracker will find it and you can monitor how it affects your professional appearance.

The site is continuing to grow as new tools are developed. The Recommendation Engine is a yet to be released tool that uses your skills and expertise to determine the next step toward developing a noteworthy web presence. Brand-Yourself likens it to your own personal career coach.

Another tool that is coming soon is the Hireability Monitor. This tool notifies you immediately in the event of a change in web presence. By doing so you’re able to make the necessary adjustments to be sure you’re image is not damaged too badly.

Because you can only do so much to control how others portray you online, the best way to combat negative content is to overwhelm it with positive stuff. By creating a website at your personal domain you’re able to direct people to it, showing them the side of you you want them to see. When you give them a place to go to find good information it limits the likelihood they’ll look around long enough to find the bad stuff.

What I Didn’t Like

There’s not too much to dislike from a concept perspective. The idea is right on track with addressing the most common internet problem currently experienced by young people – a damaged image due to negative web content. Using Brand-Yourself will definitely help you get that image better under control.

There is a small cost associated with this service (3 months/$34.95 $24.95), which I think is both fair and affordable. The hangup for me comes with my being conditioned to receiving many online services for free. I don’t think they’re wrong for charging for a service that most cannot replicate on their own, however I can see the costs to be a small barrier to entry for some people. The alternative option is them putting adds on your personal website, which undoubtedly will take away from your site’s professionalism.

My suggestion, in case they’re listening (and care what I think), is to have both a free and paid version. Currently, you can register for a trial account, which of course they hope will lead you to purchasing a paid account. The free plan I propose is the same as the current trial plan, only with sponsored ads on the personal webpages and limited use of tools. I wouldn’t change the paid version. Eventually many users would see the value and seriously consider an upgrade. Even those that didn’t would still bring in ad revenue. The end result would be a larger user base and mailing list to solicit future sales.

Of course that’s my outsider’s opinion. I’m sure they wouldn’t be getting the attention they have from Entrepreneur Magazine if they hadn’t done their research and carefully thought things out. Despite my ramble on their pricing strategy, I still think they’re onto something and can find no real fault with what they’re doing.

The Final Word

For both the Brand-Yourself.com crew and young professionals concerned about their image, this website is a winner. If you’re someone who is concerned what potential employers might think if they Googled your name, this is definitely a site you need to look into.

Brand-Yourself.com

Site Description

I wasted a lot of time in college. In fact, I probably wasted the equivalent of a full-time job just hanging out. That’s 40 plus hours of watching TV and playing drinking games every week. Not something I’m proud of. But definitely something that happens to many students. Thankfully, there’s a site out there that aims to help you become more productive in your down time.

College-Startup.com is a blog about how anyone can run a successful business from their dorm room. Regular posts discuss topics that are motivational, helpful, and original. The site is laid out like a typical blog, with content along the left side and a navigational sidebar along the right. There is very little flash, which highlights the content. This is good, since the content is usually very, very good.

College-Startup is not your typical entrepreneurial blog. Instead much of the information is directed at how a college student can or should handle situations that come up when starting and running a business. For many reasons this is different than someone running their business full-time. Availability of resources, time management, start-up capital and more is extremely different under the circumstances faced by someone in college. This blog stays focused to that niche, while also addressing situations all entrepreneurs are familiar with.

About College-Startup.com

College-Startup was started by a student from Ohio State named Ben Bleikamp. It doesn’t say what year he began the site, but the archives go all the way back to November 2005, so we’ll go with that. Originally Ben began College-Startup as a way to help and encourage college students to confidently start businesses while still in school. That goal has been more than met. In fact, the reigns have since been handed over to a couple individuals who’ve made it their goal to continue reaching college students and also to help all who would like to be entrepreneurs but need a small nudge to get started.

What I Liked

Over the past couple years I’ve been stopping in periodically to read College-Startup.com and have always left more knowledgeable than when I arrived. If you’ve never visited this site before you’ll find hours worth of archived content, most of which is still very relevant.

If you come back to the site after lengthy absences like I do, you’ll quickly realize how reader-friendly their diverse categories are. You can find the topics that interest you quickly and easily. Most blogs are like this by design, but College-Startup has drilled down the categories into very specific niches.

From a design standpoint, the color scheme is easy on the eyes, making the articles easy to read. There is a distinct separation between the content section and the sidebars, which have red backgrounds and white font.

I really like that College-Startup doesn’t try to be anything that it’s not. It’s a blog that puts out excellent content related to entrepreneurial ventures and that’s where 100% of the focus goes.

What I Didn’t Like

I’ve praised College-Startup for its simplicity and my thoughts on that haven’t changed. Accessibility to archived content is good, but I’d like to see a page that lists post titles for each month. Currently, the archives list about five posts per page, with an excerpt from each.

This isn’t bad, only a bit clunky. If there was a month with 30 posts you’d have to click through five or six pages to see them all. Again, not the most devastating issue, but a site that has such solid archived content should make it as easy as possible for readers to wade through it.

The Final Word

I rarely leave College-Startup.com without some sort of inspiration. If you’re an entrepreneur of any age or a college student looking for some flexible ways to earn some cash, this site is an awesome reference point. The advice extends to both online and offline business and is generic enough to fit into any industry, making College-Startup.com a priceless resource for budding business people.

www.College-Startup.com

However, in case you haven’t heard, the U.S. economy is in a bad way right now. Recession is a common term thrown around these days, and where there’s talk of a recession there’s concern of the D-word. Of course, in a recession things usually fix themselves over time (knock on wood), and eventually go back to normal.

While I have complete faith that this will be the case, I still think it’s best to at least be prepared.

In my quest to understand the difference between Macro and Micro, I found Recession.org. What I like about this site is it’s very up-to-date. It discusses the current economic outlook of the United States, the impact on the global economy, and what’s in store in the coming months.

Recession.org is obviously run by a person (or people) who have a great deal of interest in economics (How else do you explain a 600 word definition for ‘Recession’?). There is an abundance of recession related information, more than most people need, but during times of instability it’s good to know what to expect.

The U.S. economic news section makes sure you know exactly what’s going on lately. The best part? The layout allows you to skim article headings and quickly read a short summary without leaving the main news page. I got a complete briefing of what’s new without clicking a single link. Of course, if I wanted more detail the complete article was available with enough numbers and terms to make my head explode, but who needs that trouble?

Similarly, the library page has a collection of more timeless articles that can be scanned or read in detail depending on your needs. My needs are to absorb as much information as I can as quickly as possible without hurting myself. Mission accomplished with Recession.org.

Tim Ferriss’s book, The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, has been around for just a short while but has already turned the business world upside down. The book has been a #1 bestseller on the lists of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek. It’s you-can-do-it approach has motivated thousands to take a closer look at their lives and change for the better.

I’m reading Tim’s book now, and he was some interesting thoughts on life and how he has built systems to give himself extreme personal freedom. Tim’s is an exceptional case, but while telling his story he does a great job of getting the reader to think about their own life and find ways to be more efficient.

This isn’t a book review, though. Instead I’d like to talk about Tim’s blog. It’s called The Blog of Tim Ferriss – Experiments in Lifestyle Design. On the site he talks about all different topics, most revolving around ways you can improve your life and live efficiently. In many aspects, the blog is an ongoing continuation of the book.

The best part of the blog is the ability it gives Tim to stray from the strict topic he stuck with in his book. With all the time and writing space he needs he’s able to dive into a number of different areas, and he does. Writing about how he gained 34 lbs. of muscle in 4 weeks or how to tie the perfect tie every time and everything in between Tim brings his personality out through his blog posts.

As an added perk, Tim has a special “reader only” section on is blog where you can access additional chapters, tools, tricks and other helpful articles. By buying The Four Hour Workweek, you get a password to the extra features, which I found to be very useful. For all the free content that Tim provides, this section is the diamond. It alone is worth the price of the book, and we’ve already talked about how dense the book is with great content. If this sounds good to you, you may buy the book here.

What I like most about the blog is reading the thoughts of someone who doesn’t take life too seriously and manages to completely enjoy it at the same time. He’s created systems to beat the system, which allows him the freedom to do anything he wants. This isn’t something everyone can do, but for those who want to try Tim Ferriss is someone to keep an eye on.