During my interview with the Career Sherpa Hanna Morgan, we discussed the pros and cons of personal landing pages. Hanna covers them in detail her book The Infographic Resume.
As I have said on multiple occasions, I am firm believer that everyone should have their own website. The technology has advanced to the point that you can literally have a website up and running in 5 minutes. In fact, if you watch this video and sign up for my CareerBranding.Academy course, you can have your website up and running in no time. But I digress.
Personal Landing Pages
To start, let me define what a personal landing page (PLP) is and is not. A PLP is simply a page on the web dedicated to you. It’s a page you “control” the content on and can use it as a hub to point people somewhere else, such as to your social media accounts like LinkedIn or Twitter.
Think of it as a hub and spoke distribution system.
PROS:
With this model, you can direct people where you want them to go. This is especially handy if you have a fairly common name like James Smith. James was the most common name in America in 2013 with just over 38K other James’ to contend with. Michael Smith came in number two with only 34.8K other alter egos.
Another pro of personal landing pages is that they are easy to put together. All you need to sign up, follow the directions and in a matter of minutes you will have a personal landing page on the web you can point people to when they ask. Sounds great, doesn’t it?
For some people, it is great and is all they will ever need. But there are some drawbacks.
CONS:
The single biggest con for any personal landing page is that you don’t OWN the content. Yes, you control what gets put on it but you don’t own it. How can that be you might be asking? Simple. Ask yourself this; what happens when you’ve spent a lot of time building your PLP and the company who owns the platform suddenly goes out of business?
The answer, you lose everything. Your PLP will simply vanish overnight. Now if you think this is an extreme case let’s look at another. Technology, as you know, is constantly changing, both in advances and popularity. What if you had chosen MySpace as your PLP back in the day? Justin Timberlake or not, MySpace is not the place to be today.
And that’s the other problem with the PLP’s, their popularity can ebb and flow and when it does you may find yourself switching platforms, over and over.
Popular Personal Landing Pages
So let’s say you are convinced that you need a PLP for your brand. No problem, there are several different options for you to choose from. Here are two popular ones; one has been around for a while the other is newer.
About.me
eOLIO
About.me
About.me was found in 2009 and officially launched in 2010. So what is About.me? Here is how About.me defines themselves on their About Us Page.
“We believe that you should own your own identity. That your identity should be both projected and protected. It should encompass the different facets of your life. It should be portable and universally accessible. And most importantly, it should be easy to create and manage.”
So what does this mean to you? It means you can easily create and manage a homepage on the web. About.me is free to join, requiring only your name and email address. If there is a paid version, I have not yet found it.
Once you sign up you get immediate access to begin creating your homepage. It’s a very simple step-by-step process. You can add as much or as little as you like.
In a future post, I will go into some behind the scene details on how to set-up your About.me page but, for now, know that the user interface is very simple and easy to follow. In just a few minutes you can have a customized homepage on the web. Here’s what mine looks like.
UPDATE: eOLIO ceased operations in may 2016
eOLIO is the new kid on the block compared to About.me. Founded by Traci and Bobby Johnstone, eOLIO is another personal landing page. From their FAQ page here is eOLIO’s answer to what is eOLIO?
“eOLIO derives from the word e-portfolio. eOLIO is an online service that provides easy-to-use tools to control and enhance your online brand. We’ve made it easy for people to create professionally branded e-portfolios and for recruiters to locate, pre-screen and acquire talent via an eOLIO.”
Like About.me, eOLIO is designed to be an easy to use platform to provide you with a homepage on the web. eOLIO has two Creator memberships available; Free and Premium. The premium membership provides additional features such as enhanced SEO and the ability to add video and audio clips.
Speaking of video clips, they have a very clever video on their homepage. It’s only a minute long but it’s worth it.
I plan to go into some behind the scene details on how to set-up your eOLIO page very soon but, for now, know that like About.me the user interface is very simple and easy to follow. Here is what my eOLIO landing page looks like.
QUESTION: Do you use Personal Landing Pages? If so, which ones? Let me know on twitter @RyanRhoten.
