Customizing Your TypePad Profile

Whether you are a commenter or a blog owner, your TypePad profile can be a powerful tool for creating an online presence, achieving good popularity and driving traffic to yourself, your blog or your business. 

Before you even start the set up, it is important to find out the goals of your profile first.  Who is your audience, what information will they need from your profile, and what type of persona do you want to convey? Below are some tips for constructing a great online profile for the professional vs. personal blogger.

For a professional profile :

• Your display name should be your real name or your company/business name, especially if you want your network to know who you are to contact you around new opportunities.
  

• Choose a photo that is representative of you, your blog or the business that you run. If your business revolves around your personal brand, you should consider uploading a photo of yourself to showcase on your profile and when commenting. Alternatively, if you’re business has a brand or logo, choose what would best represent the business that you run.

• Link to your blog or business website under ‘Blogs and Sites’

• If you have a LinkedIn or Twitter account for the blog or business, you should list your id under ‘Around the Web’. The content in your bio and interests should be focused around your blog or the business. Other site accounts such as your delicious, AIM, Digg,  can additionally be showcased in this section.

• Last but not least, because your profile aggregates comment activity, use your profile to leave comments around the web that you want to show up on your profile. That means you may want to consider using another profile to comment on sites that you don’t want showing up on your profile.
  
  

 A personal profile can be as fun or serious as you want it to be:

• Your display name can be your real name, a nickname or something that represents you.

• Choose a photo that is representative of how you are outside of work. Are you goofy and funny? How about a photo that captures your personality!

• Link to your blog or personal site under ‘Blogs and Sites’. If you have other personal accounts on the web, don’t forget to list them under ‘Around the Web’.  Readers can get a better idea of what you are about by looking at these links.  It’s also a great way to drive traffic and build your network on other sites.

• The content in your bio and interests is where you can really express yourself.  You can write under a single theme or show people how diverse you are!  While we encourage users to freely express themselves, it’s important to remember that what you put on the web can be found by anyone out there including people in your professional network.