There is no alternative to having a business card…this is your identity, it is what tells people what you do. Same goes for internet presence. This is your online business card.

Gone are the days when a practicing professional could afford to go without significant online presence. The world has indeed become a global village and contracts are now signed without any physical meeting between the parties.

Having your own internet presence, either for you personally or for your business is necessary for the following reasons:

• It tells the world what you do;
• Interested parties know where to find you;
• International clients find it easy to contact you;
• You can publish your articles and make them available to the whole world for free, this in turn establishes you as an authority in your niche;
• An online presence will brand you and your business;
• It will keep your readers up to date with what is going on in your personal or professional world.

It is no longer difficult to acquire internet presence. Depending on your budget, you can explore the follwing options:

Web Designers: These days, you can find any of these without much difficulty. They know their stuff and will give you custom and beautifully made websites. However, this depends on your budget as they can be somewhat expensive. Also, you need to be very sure of the expertise of whomever you choose as there are a lot of charlatans masking around as web designers, they will take your money and deliver a substandard website.

Free Hosting: There are many websites that make it possible for you to create your own website for free. If you have a domain name, (which only costs $10 i.e approximately N2,000) you can use that. Even if you do not have a domain name, you can use a subdomain; I have tried this myself, you can check out http://sharron.bravehost.com to see what I’m talking about.

They also have loads of templates which you can customize and make into what you wish. You do not need to have any knowledge of html or any programming language…just copy and paste.

What is the catch? They place discreet adverts on your website. This is how they can offer it to you for free.

I will post a list of those free sites at a future date..

Blogs: Blogs, derived from the world ‘weblog’ is an online journal. Or at least is started out that way. This consists of dated entries, that is, you can put information on the page and keep updating. Each time you update, the post is automatically dated.

The beauty of this is that it is free and it is completely DIY (do it yourself). Like the free sites, you can either use your own domain name or a subdomain, like http://thereservir.wordpress.com or http://sherlockholmesclub.blogspot.com. These are both subdomains. You can have as many pages as you want depending on the host you use

On a blog, you can have information about yourself or your business, you can also post your articles and your opinion about several issues.
Check the about page of this blog.
Check back for a post on how to create your own blog.

Social Networks: Examples of these are MySpace, HI5 and Facebook. These are called social networks; you can place information about yoruself, your work and anything else you want. However, it would be clumsy posting the many articles you probably have.

There is no longer any excuse for not having an internet presence. Well, maybe except PHCN (epileptic Power) and even that does not hold water any longer, not with cybercafés all around. You do not even have to spend a dime and it is so necessary in making you a force to be reckoned with globally. Well, at least on the internet. Don’t believe me? Google up my name…try it – Sharon Famonure. Then google up yours. Any articles there? Yes…Congratulations! No…? Don’t fret. You can change that now!