Resumes are dead.

It’s great news for people who like to do a little more than the average person.

It’s terrible news for the average person.

So if you haven’t worked it out yet, the world view of you and me is our digital footprint. Which so happens to be arbitrated by Google these days. The good thing is that we can take control of our digital footprint with a little bit of effort. The great thing is that the effort required to develop a reputable digital footprint is simpler than the old way. The old way was battling in the career world to build a reasonable CV, a CV which was very much decided by a variety of gate keepers. We can in a digital world invent specific credentials regardless of what our formal qualifications are, or our work experience is. No one can stop us. We can self publish our way to what ever reputation we desire. We can do this because the gatekeepers of yesteryear have all left the building. Gate keepers like university admissions personnel, and HR managers who kept us out of that career or industry we so desperately wanted to get into.

There are many ways to build your personal brand. But here’s a few rules I set for myself:

Own your .com address: Mine is here. If we have our own .com and some relevant content feeding to and from it it will be the first organic search result for your name in Google. This is what we want – control.

Self publish in your area of interest: Mine is my blog. This blog is the second organic Google result under my name.

Choose a traffic directing tool: My preferred one is twitter. It’s where I find like minds and have discussions on the stuff that matters to me.

Link all your digital bits: You’ll see my .com and my blog and my twitter all feed into each other. This is what helps the Google juice choose your footprint over other search results.

Use them: Setting them up, is not the same as populating them. If you publish regularly, then you will decide what the world sees when they search you.

What we don’t want is our facebook page to be first thing people land upon when they find us on-line, and not even our LinkedIn for that matter.

It should be our content. Here’s a zillion personal websites for inspiration. It might even end up being worth more than that degree hanging on our walls.

This stuff matters more than anything else when it comes to entrepreneurial endeavours, job security, pursuing life goals and our financial position. Because it is the first place people look to now when they are getting their first impression of someone. It is an asset, and an asset that we can choose to own, or let someone else own on our behalf. I know which one I prefer.

To hear more from Steve Sammartino about creating your personal brand purchase your ticket to the Better Business Summit today. Places are strictly limited and will sell out!

Steve Sammartino, speaker, writer and lecturer

Steve Sammartino had his first startup before the age of 10 running an organic egg farm in the 1970’s before the words organic or startup had been invented. The first phase of his ‘adult’ career was in Marketing working his way into senior executive roles in global consumer goods companies and advertising agencies. He escaped his cubicle for the first time in 2005 and founded rentoid.com – a peer to peer renting portal. After exiting more than 3 years ago he has embarked on a number of crazy projects including putting a Lego space shuttle into actual orbit, building a jet powered bicycle, and crowd funding to build a full size lego car with an engine made of lego, which runs on air.

Steve now travels the world helping companies transition from industrial era thinking into the digital age. He is a board member of multiple companies including Tomcar Australia (Australia’s first car startup in over 50 years) he lectures in Marketing at Melbourne University, writes for the ABC on business & technology issues and his blog has over 50,000 readers a month.

He’s an expert on the shift to the digital and connected economy and loves helping people make sense of it all.