Creating a brand and blogging are two important steps to getting yourself known, but are of little use if you do not actively build relationships through networking.

A good friend of mine, Rob, has some great advice: Get to the pub. When a project comes up and someone wants a Flex developer, you want to be front-of-mind.

Of course networking is more than simply going to the pub, it’s talking to friends and colleagues online, it’s attending conferences and groups. In essence it’s about ‘getting out there’.

Build Online Relationships

Many of my contacts are not from the London area, but include locations such as Brighton, Edinburgh and Birmingham. Added to this, I have international contacts in countries such as Australia, Belgium, New Zealand and the United States.

Clearly it isn’t easy to call up these people and say ‘do you want to go to the pub’. Therefore, building online relationships is a must. There are a whole host of services that essentially let people understand me as a person, not just a work colleague.

I use, to varying degrees, services such as FriendFeed, SocialThing, BrightKite, Jaiku, Meebo, Bebo, MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, LibraryThing, Cork’d and Dopplr. Indeed, you can find links to my most-used services in the footer of my site.

Take a look at the links in the footer and get to know me. You may notice that all the services are registered under my brand name. Again, this allows people to draw association with the profile they are looking at and me. It also means that if you want to follow me on one or many services, it won’t be hard to find me.

Attend Local Meetings and User Groups

Attending local ‘geek’ meets is a great way to meet like-minded people, exchange thoughts and quite possibly find work. These meetings can be found on the Yahoo! service Upcoming.org and on Meetup.com.

On the odd occassion, I may be found at meetings such as the Web Standards Meetup, the ColdFusion User Group, London Geeks, the London Flash Platform User Group, the Flex London User Group etc. (I do have a life outside my work, honestly!)

Attend Conferences Related to Your Industry

Conferences are really an extension of local user groups and meetings, but they allow you to network with a wider, often international, audience. It is quite possible to spend a few days a month attending conferences, so chosing ones relevant to you are key.

In the past I have attended, Adobe MAX, Scotch-on-the-Rocks and CFDevCon, but there are a tranche of other conferences that could be equally relevant such as CFUnited Europe, 360Flex and Flash on the Beach.

Conferences provide a varying degree of networking and job opportunities, but if anything they provide a great sneak-peek into what other people are working on and in what direction the industry is heading.

What’s Next

In the final part of this series I will introduce methods by which you can advertise your business.

In the dim and distant past, the job of publicising yourself was extremely difficult. Can you imagine life without the Internet, mobile telephones and email? How did people ever do business? With the advent of the World Wide Web and in particular search engines and blogging, this all changed and a wealth of opportunity has become available, especially to the freelancer.

But where do you start?

Create a Brand

Creating a brand is a great way to market yourself. This does not have to be the same as your company, and through time you may set up different brands for different sectors or ideas you may have. Brands serve to create associations and therefore, expectations of products you create, so a good brand name is a great way to get recognised in your community.

You can register the brand in the UK, Europe and the US, although the latter requires a US address. It is also not a given that your brand registration will be successful, making it a costly exercise. Careful consideration is what is needed here.

Create an Avatar

Avatars are images or icons that represent you in the online world. They are an extension of your brand. For example, the header of my website is also my favicon and avatar on various online services. It is a great way for people to draw an association between your online presence and you.

Create a Blog

Blogs are a great way to get yourself known and therefore heard amongst your peer group. Your blog should really be an extension of your brand and is a great avenue to showcase your skills, demo example applications, code and designs, or simply give your opinion on a subject.

I use the excellent WordPress blogging application, in a self-hosted environment. You don’t need to do this since there is a hosted version at WordPress.com, or you could use Blogger, another popular blogging platform, provided by Google.

The key to blogging is talk about what you enjoy, don’t just keep it technical. Blogs should be an extension of you, not an avenue for pretentious comment; you’ll soon be found out!

If you go the self-hosted route, you’ll need a domain name, hosting provider and obviously a blog application. I have listed a few below that can get you started.

Domain Names:

• Nominet
• Easily
• EuroDNS

Hosting Providers:

• HostMySite
• Titan Internet
• Flint Hosts
• UKHost4U
• 1and1

Blog Applications:

• WordPress (free)
• Moveable Type (free)
• ExpressionEngine (free)
• TypePad

If going the self-hosted is all too complicated for you or you simply don’t want the hassle that is associated with self-hosting, all is not lost. WordPress.com and Blogger are for you.

Blog Hosting Providers:

• WordPress.com
• Blogger

Both services take the onus away from the user when it comes to management (backups, plugins etc). At the simplest level, all you need to do is create and publish the content.

Join feed aggregators

To get noticed in the blogosphere, you can’t simply rely on the Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft search engines ranking your site. You will need to alert your peers to the fact that you’ve created some content that is worth reading. You can achieve this with feed aggregators.

Below I list a few that I use:

• Adobe
• Full-as-a-Goog
• ColdFusionBloggers
• Feed Squirrel
• London Bloggers

If you use WordPress, then you’re in luck. WordPress has a service called Ping-o-matic, which updates different search engines when your blog has been updated. You can also add your own services to ping and therefore notify the service of new content.

Comment on Blogs

Commenting on blogs is another great way of getting yourself known as well as offering an opinion. Since comments allow you to include a link back to your website, try and comment as your brand.

One tip, try not to be defamatory towards the blog owner, or others unless you have a strong justification for doing so. It’s all about the karma!

Join Micro-Blogging Services

If blogging is not your thing or you don’t have time to write articles, there are a number of blogging and, more importantly, micro-blogging services available to you that allow you to get your thoughts out into the wide-world.

Such services include the not-always-venerable Twitter, the feature rich Pownce, the new kid on the block Plurk and the blogging service, Tumblr.

Building a following will allow you to announce to your followers important events and ask questions of them.

What’s Next

In the next part of this series, I’ll talk about networking, a natural extension to publicising yourself on the web.