Your Online Presence

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>> Pete DeBettignies: So I'm gonna go tonight during happy hour or hamburger, whatever y'all are gonna do, or tomorrow on my plane back home, or for those of you who are in the Minnesota area, I'm gonna hop on, pick a registrar, GoDaddy or whatever, and I'm gonna go get a domain name for myself if I already don't have one.

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So I picked up mnheadhunter.com in 2005 cuz I started writing my blog. And I didn't know what to call it back then I figured since I was a Minnesota headhunter I was a rocket scientist what all I should get mnheadhunter.com right? Then a friend of mine about nine months later was like, did you get minnesotaheadhunter.com like no why would I do that?

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I should probably go do that. So then I picked up. I now have but I want to get my domain name. Okay, usually it's going to be I got, I got mnheadhunter.com because no one can spell or pronounce. Right, It's not an easily searched word. But if I can get first name, last name, last name.com, I got tossed in the middle initial.

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If there is something about you that has been with you during your lifetime that you want to be known about, it could be some of you might form an LLC. And become an independent contractor in the next months or a year, I would go and get that domain name, like right away, okay.

[00:01:12]
The idea in I have this funky little bike tire there. The ideas you need to find a hub for you online, right. So, whether it's your future business card, if it's anything where you're going to be public you want people to go to one place and then spoke out from there.

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For some of you it actually will end up being just LinkedIn and that's okay too. But you are now front end web developers. You are not entry level. You are now a junior developer, you're a front end developer, so you you will be able to make your own website.

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I would caution you with this, so many people create their own website and then forget about it for two years. And then I'm judging you on the thing that you built two years ago. Make sure that you're updating these things. Okay? We unfortunately make some snap judgments now and again, so if you're really talented front end developer and you're saying on LinkedIn, your resume, you can do all your things and I go to your website, and it sucks.

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Just be cognizant of that as you getting into this. But the idea then is from there though, then you've got links to LinkedIn and GitHub and Twitter, contact me more stuff about your portfolio and the sites that you've helped to create. You need to find a presence online that you own.

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So I'm gonna talk a little bit about building a portfolio. You and I were talking earlier about the changes you've made to your website just while you've been here. And I would strongly encourage you all to do the before and after stuff. So if you didn't get the photos before since I gave you this brilliant advice, you could screenshot how your website looks now and view it again now two weeks from now, six months ago whatever it's going to be.

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And you can start showing people here's how I as a junior developer have expanded my horizons. This is how I took what was and turned it to something else. Because you're going to need to I don't wanna use the word prue but validate to a future employer that they want to hire you.

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And if you could say, well, this is the before and this is the after. Okay, I want you to be able to do that. So take screenshots for those of you who already are into building websites, like get the metrics of those websites. For those of you who will be doing it and so 18 months from now you made a new feature, you did a new thing to the website and traffic went up 17%, 12% whatever it might be.

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Average time on the website went from 45 seconds to three and a half minutes. But document this stuff will show you how to do that a little while though, okay? Because you want to be able to make it so that when you're doing your resume your LinkedIn profile for your interview that you're going to have one day.

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Because I did this, this result happened and this is the impact it had on a business's bottom line, increased cost. Don't do that one, increased costs, increase sales cut costs, we increased the email newsletter by 17%. Right, make us that you could document these things that you've been doing so that you can show a future employer.

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But that idea of you created a feature. And this is how it was, this is how it has changed you have four screenshots. Employers are going to dig on that stuff in the very beginning because these are things you're going to rely on. Because you don't have a seven year track record yet.

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Okay.