Looking better online: Optimising your online presence course

My “Optimising Your Online Presence” workshop was inspired by an unfortunate googling incident – as I described in my post on googling yourself – but the workshop itself turned into a very fortunate incident indeed! It was the coming together of a great variety of professionals in Perth – authors, a language teacher, several artists, small business owners of various sorts and even a cheese maker. I told the group before we started the day that I had at least six thousand things I wanted to tell them, but that I’d tried to keep it down to just the most important one thousand of them – I’m not sure I succeeded, but it was a whole lot of fun trying.

Before the course, I did some good old “practice what I preach” and googled all the names on my class role. They were all a bit surprised when I told them I’d been checking up on them – but that’s the modern world and I was a bit shocked that nobody had googled me when they enrolled in the course. What if I turned out to be a chocolate-loving, crazy nerd? (Oh, I am. Well, it seems nobody minded too much.)

Each of the participants was at a different stage of their “online development” – some had well-established websites and Facebook pages while others were just starting out, with some still in the early days of start-up of their business itself (how wise of them to come on this kind of course already, I thought). For those with established sites, I made them sit through a website audit – watching a new user look around their site (they were often surprised to see where people clicked).

We spent quite a lot of time playing with Facebook, tweaking little bits like what I call the “ugly number” that Facebook pages have in their URL until you are able to replace it with a custom URL, as well as talking big picture stuff like how to create engaging content and get your “likers” involved with your page. I also managed to explain a few of the confusions of Twitter, though it remains to be seen if I converted too many to using it – I adore Twitter, but I think most people need to explore it several times before they see the fun and usefulness of it. We covered lots of other areas too: optimising your website, having a blog, and looking at other social media possibilities like Pinterest, Google+ and LinkedIn.

Big thanks to all the people who came along – I hope you had as much fun as I did, although if you’re even half as exhausted as I am after our long busy day, I apologise! In the spirit of sharing and caring, here’s a list of some of the participants from today – hop over to their (sometimes new) Facebook pages and tell them I sent you!

• Natasha Lester, author

• The Cheese Maker (and I can personally vouch for how fabulous their courses are!)

• Glennys Marsdon, author of Me Time and blogger at The Ponder Room

• David Beard, Lifelong Fitness (he told me chocolate is good for you. I think he lied.)

• The Decor Empress

• Oakwood Inspirational, life coaching

• Gabriela Dolfi, Spanish teacher

• Jennifer Sulaj, artist

• Arty Brellas from Tricia Stedman