Social Media sites continue to proliferate and we social  networkers collect new urls like shoes.  When it comes time to list all the places we can be found on the internet, it’s about as difficult as finding the left shoe that broke loose from the rack!

Having a single composite of all the domains is necessary and wise.  Who knows where your friend is looking for you.  Will they locate you?  The difference between being found and not is up to you.

You’ve taken the time to be present on the web, you’ve carefully crafted a social media plan but now it needs to be consolidated.

I’ve had a domain of my own name for many years.  Initially I purchased it just because I feared someone else would.  It sat parked at GoDaddy for many ages!  This past year I put it into service as a doorway to the many places I can be found on the web.  I used a simple free WordPress template to create it.  Have a look, here.  Looking at it now it looks, well boring!  No, I’ll keep it, but instead of driving traffic there I’ve decided to use card.ly.com instead.

Card.ly is a free service if you are satisfied with the basic.  Even when you upgrade it won’t break the bank.

Getting Set Up

The most difficult part will be remembering all of your user names.  Card.ly helps you to remember with a list of available networks.  I found just looking at the list helped me remember if I had an account there or not.  Lucky for me I use RoboForm so once I went looking it was easy to find my username and password.  (hint, get RoboForm if you have more than two passwords!)

Once you list all your networks, you get to write a blurb about yourself.  When completed, you browse through the rather large gallery to find a “skin” that suites your taste.  Pick one, save it and you have a  very nice looking card.ly!

Spreading the Word

The  next activity is to share your success by tweeting about it and/or embedding a widget on your website.  You can see my Card.ly widget on the right sidebar.

What’s the cost?

Card.ly is a free service if you are satisfied with the basic.  Even when you upgrade it won’t break the bank.  I didn’t think I would spend the $25 to upgrade, but after reading the difference, I certainly will be purchasing the
“Premium Version.”   The extra features are very attractive, look for yourself:

• no advertisng! Yeah!
• use my own domain
• the <nofollow> tags become <dofollow> very important!
• increased RSS streams.  Ok I know I have too many blogs!  It’s a passion what can I say?

So look over this fun service and see if you find configuring it as easy as I did.

I’m going to use my own domain and link to it from my Twitter profile.  Now assuming anyone is interested they can find out about me and where to find me in cyberspace.

What will you do with it?

Connecting Your Social Media Dots is a post from: Kristalks

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