Five Tips to Marketing Yourself Online

TheSOCExchange.com, an e-commerce site that allows the sale of unlimited items online for a flat subscription fee of $1 per month without collecting any commissions or listing fees, has launched a career portal that leverages the online marketing tools the platform offers to its sellers for use by job seekers to market their skills and expertise. Founder, Franco Lagudi offers five tips on using online tools to find jobs:

1.  Build a network: Your best advocates will be your family, friends and contacts so they all need to know that you’re looking for work. With the proliferation of online social media tools, it is now easy to communicate with large groups of friends and to make new contacts online.

2. Build a web page: Not all your contacts will know how good you are at what you do, so it’s important to tell them and have an easily accessible web presence allowing people to get more knowledge about what makes you great.

3. Communicate with your network: People will refer the first qualified person that pops into their head so remind them regularly that you are looking. The best way to stay top of mind is to maintain a steady flow of communication without seeming desperate or annoying your friends. Ask them to follow your blog or your email newsletters, create content that might be interesting to them and artfully weave in ways to talk about your search, how it is progressing and what your workplace accomplishments have been. That way, you can get them to keep coming back to your ‘SOC site’ so you will be the first person they think of  when they hear about an opportunity.

4. Keep learning: Continue to look for ways that you can become better at what you do. If that means figuring out what Twitter is all about or reading journals that cover your industry, stay on top of the game and build out your expertise and capabilities. Express the things you are learning with your online communications tools.

5. Get recommended and recommend others: You never know where that next lead is going to come from so do your best to help others in their searches and they may repay the favor. If you know of any other people who are looking for work and you come across an opportunity that is not right for you but could be for them, pass it along! Chances are they will do the same.

(photo credit: Newscom)