We’ve already covered why and how to pick a personal domain. Now that you have one, what can you do with it? Here are five ideas.
1. Fun with email addresses
The great thing about a personal domain is that it’s yours for as long as you’re willing to pay the measly $10/year for it. If your job changes, your domain won’t. If you sell your company, you’ll still have your personal domain. That means you’ll always be reachable to the people that have your email address at your personal domain. Here are potential configurations you might consider for your email address:
- If you manage to get LastName.com (congrats!), then the best email address you could have is clearly FirstName@LastName.com. (Don’t forget to offer email addresses to your family members too!)
- If you had to get FirstNameLastName.com, don’t sweat. Try an email address like hello@FirstNameLastName.com, hire@FirstNameLastName.com, or shout@FirstNameLastName.com (get it? “Shout at kelly carter dot com” is pretty clever, I think).
- Refer to the first article (How to Pick a Personal Domain) for using the @ sign creatively.
- If you really want someone to be able to reach you, try YourPhoneNumber@FirstNameLastName.com. All at once, they know your name, your website address, your email, and your phone number. Neat!
If you don’t want to bother with figuring out how to host your own email, considering signing up for Google Apps. It’s inexpensive, they handle the email hosting and spam detection, and you get a whole lot of other services to boot. You might also consider Namecheap’s email hosting. Both will require making some changes to your domain name’s DNS records.
2. Feature your resume
Perhaps as important as an email address is a website (it doesn’t have to be complex or fancy) that allows access to your current resume. The easier it is for a potential employer to find your resume, the better your chances. Even if you’re not currently looking, it’s a good idea to keep your resume accessible and up-to-date. You might consider redirecting your domain to your profile on a service like LinkedIn, re.vu, or Vizualize.me as well.
3. Start blogging
You don’t have to start a blog, so don’t let the prospect of blogging regularly stop you from getting a personal domain. My rule for blogging on my personal domain is “when I have something useful to share and I have time to write about it.” You might want to limit your blogging to just industry topics, or you might not want to focus on work at all – it’s up to you, but whatever you do, keep it at least business casual in tone, styling, and content.
4. Create your own personalized default browser page
Lifehacker has a good suggestion: get rid of the Google search bar or the about:blank page and create a personalized start page. (Lifehacker has other good suggestions too.)
5. Redirect to your primary social media profile
If you’d rather not bother with a website or blog, you can just redirect your domain name to a social media profile. Again, LinkedIn is a solid choice. I would recommend using a service (like Persona) that will scour your social media profiles for dodgy posts and photos that you should probably remove first if you go this route (or even if you don’t, to be honest).
Need some website inspiration? Fizzle.co has a great list of awesome personal domains that are doing great work lifting up the creator’s personal brand.
Got a personal domain and site set up already? Put a link in the comments and tell us about your thoughts as you built it!
Hi Kelly – nice tips regarding creating a personal domain and the various ways you can use it as a tool. I never thought of the phone number + name to equal an email address. That’s clever!
I have a question for you, and maybe other readers wondered too: How do you decide when to share which email address with your contacts (the Rainworks brand versus your personal brand)? I know some choices would be obvious, like using Rainworks with a client, and perhaps the personal brand with a group or affiliation you belong to, but what advice would you offer an employee who needs to use the company brand email address, but might eventually leave that place of employment?
Making sure that your social profiles – especially LinkedIn – are included with your personal brand certainly will help you stay in touch with others in their preferred channels. And making sure your current contacts are connected to you in the appropriate social networks is something to stay on top of as you go. Hmm, I might just have answered my above question! ;-)
I always enjoy reading your posts, Kelly! Good virtual food for thought!
Hi Tracy!
It depends on the contact, in what context you met them, and what kind of a relationship you expect to have with them. The first thing I’d recommend is to stop using your company email address to send and receive personal email. A lot of people do that, which contributes to the problem of losing contact with people when you leave your job. All those personal contacts should have had your personal email to begin with. If you’re not sure how a new relationship is going to play out, just tell the person that you prefer to only receive work-related email at your work address. I’ve done that, and it’s worked pretty well. Anyone that violates my rule gets a reply-to header in my response email that makes them send their reply to my personal email. (Most mail clients have this feature.)
As far as social networks go, yes, that is the easiest way to stay in touch with anyone, that’s true. I generally list both email addresses on social networks for this reason and because email address is a common way of searching for people, I want to be sure I can be found by both work and personal contacts.
I hope I answered your question!