Edit: After giving the toolbar a good month long trial, I decided to pull it down. I suspect it would be more useful for a enterprise level blog.

If you have visited my blog recently, You may have noticed the new toolbar situated at the bottom of the window. I am trying out the Wibiya toolbar (beta), which I stumbled across a few days ago on another blog. The thing that I was most intrigued by was the twitter feature, in the fact that everything can be accomplished on-site. I am a big proponent of eliminating unnecessary clicks in internet browsing, so I am giving it a try. It is easy to see that people are more likely to share a blog post, video, picture, etc if it is easy to do so, and fewer clicks is a technique for achieving this. Granted, I think the value of such a tool gains momentum when one has a larger readership, but it is worth trying out anyway.

I typically don’t like big, cumbersome widgets, because they can often make sharing a blog post more difficult than it should be.  The Wibiya toolbar, however, seems to have the right mix of simplicity and features.  If you’d like to try it out, head over to the Wibiya site and request a beta invite (I think it is just a formality, they sent me an access code within hours of applying. They seem like cool folks, give them a follow on twitter @Wibiya (be sure to check out the cool resolution adjuster on the top right corner of their website, it allows you to change from 1024 to wide screen at the click of a button).

–Jeff

I’ve submitted my domain to Google, Yahoo and Bing. I’ve already taken several simple steps to optimize my content for crawlers. And the results so far? For the keyword “jeff shearer”, I rank 36th on Google. Yahoo hasn’t indexed me yet, and Bing? [...]

You might have noticed that I purchased a new domain, www.jeffrshearer.com. I recently decided to seriously claim my personal brand online after googling my name and finding most of my online presence had been relegated to page 2. This website is part of a larger project throughout this summer that I have designated as my “personal branding project”.

It is my belief that personal branding has become increasing important in today’s digital age. There are now more avenues than ever to send a message about yourself, and even more ways to screw it up! It is my intention with this project to maximize my online presence and reputation. While the content on this domain is already up and running, it is far from complete. Besides frequent content updates, I see this project as an excellent opportunity to expand my knowledge of search engine optimization, graphic and web design. I will also closely track my progress, and provide updates on this blog occasionally, under the category “Personal Branding Project”.

I hope that this project will be an excellent hands-on experience, and it is my hope that the reader may find some reward in following my progress, perhaps embarking on their own personal branding initiative too!

Stay tuned.

-Jeff Shearer