How To Create An Online Portfolio
Creating Online Portfolios
Building up an online portfolio is something that has become easier than ever and also free for the masses, you can create an online portfolio for anything you can imagine and there are specialist websites that can be used to list your samples with seemingly unlimited storage capacity.
Portfolio samples range from photography, writing, art, crafts and a whole variety of specialist expertises that you can show to prove your credentials. The benefits of showcasing your online portfolio is rather a simple reason and one that is about embracing the internet technology that has improved in leaps and bounds over the years and the amount of potential employers who are online today, aswell as regular households.
Big companies always have eyes and ears out for new talent and people who produce quality samples of whatever it is that they do, so never lose sight of this fact. An online resume or CV works best when you can combine all of your experiences with actual finished results, like a website, people want to see what you are all about and professional looking samples say it all and speak louder than a list of work history.
Really though, on the internet you are spoilt for choice with the amount of free spaces online that you can literally dump your best profile work for potential employer scrutiny, so here we shall go through them one by one.
A great blogging platform, which you can write blog posts about almost anything and add videos and photos which makes it ideal for writing, speaking and photography samples to be placed on a blog, you are allowed the freedom of interlinking blog posts, so you can fully create a categorized portfolio if you wish and with space in the sidebar to add direct links to each portfolio content section, also like many other sites that is interesting is the profile page as you can write about yourself and link to it on your blog and this of course supports your online portfolio work.
Blogs can be updated anytime with new and fresh information.
An image uploading site that is for artists and photographers, professional or amateur, it is a great site for image traffic and a showcase for photographic work. You can tag your work and add an extra link in your description to other samples online.
Flickr is a great site for image based portfolio work and you can spread the images around the internet a bit.
These two authority sites both provide the standard profile page and the ability to create endless content pages about anything you know alot about, your own skills and expertise should shine through on these content publishing sites, the communities that surround these two sites are worth being involved in for the extra exposure of your expertise alone.
These websites are considered new by all acounts of the content publishing scene and are very popular and for the moment community sites that excel at helping each other out with their hubpages and squidoo lenses through their forums.
Social networking sites
These are the best of the best, quite recently they have exploded with new social networks being created to fulfill the same user requirements of connecting with other like minded people, the tools that are attached to social platforms are very useful for getting the word out on your samples and work.
The top ones are the most popular ones, like:
The original social site to promote bands and musicians back in the day, but with it now you can promote any business or do anything with it, within reason of course, now with millions of members worldwide, this is a site to consider promoting your online profile.
Created as a way for students to connect, the facebook site just exploded with the amount of social features that all put eyes onto individual accounts when you updated everytime and now with the addition of numerous applications you can pretty much showcase the kitchen sinks of tiny ants if they had them.
Facebook groups help to bring people interested into your groups themes and join and interact, sot hat could be a good area for adding your portfolio or a facebook page that just adds onto the group or your facebook profile.
Important Points To Note About Online Portfolios
- Always put your best work on your portfolio, as sometimes I have seen others portfolios and they just include everything that they have ever done, which is fine, but then not in a way, because you are just shoving everything all in and not organizing your best content to the forefront.
- Tag and keyword everything effectively, so that it can be found through the search engines, just remember that your keywords act as markers to be found by potential employers, so put exactly what companies and employers are looking for and hope for the best!
- Add relevant information to support your online portfolio, such as a recent photo of yourself, age and brief working history that is relevant to your portfolios subject, if it's not, leave it out!
- Make sure there is one or two ways to contact you, either your phone number or email, email is the prefered option and it is best to use an email account that is only used for the purpose of getting contacted by potential employers, bearing in mind that this option is open to spam, but try to black list the spammers and filter them out, oh and check new emails regularly!
Other social networks that you could use for an online portfolio:
Online profiles that sparkle are the ones that stand out from the crowd, a diverse mix of media, such as audio, video, images and the written word all arranged nicely on the page in an easy to read format are the ones that could get the most attention if you put in a little effort to promote it a little.
There are other places and obviously I didn't want to go through them all, but I suppose it is just about what you want to use for your online portfolio base of operations....Go and tell the world about yourself, but please do not spam!!
