So. You’re an actor. Or a dancer. Or a comedian. Maybe you’re a spoken word artist.
You need to promote yourself. Of course, you know that you should use every tool available to do so. You’ve got your resume, and a good cover letter (and you’ve slaved over both of them to get them just right).  You’re taking courses. You’re going to as many auditions as you can. You’re writing letters.
But are you using the Internet?
Many actors forget to use the internet as a tool for self promotion. When you think about it, it does make sense to use it. After all, Googling is something that we all do. If you want to find out about a company you want to work at, you Google them. If you are curious about someone you’ve recently met, you might Google them too. Why would you not try to take advantage of this?
If you want someone to be able to successfully Google you, you need to have a web presence.
That is what I want to help you do here.
This site will be used to teach you how you can a) set up your own web presence, b) use it successsfully and c) keep people coming back to your site.
There is one step that’s most important. So important that you shouldn’t wait for another second before you do it. Buy your domain name now. Before you worry about doing anything else on the internet, you should buy your domain name. Purchase your name with a .com, or a .net extension. If you can, buy the .com. Over time the .com extension has become the most popular, so I’d recommend that this is what you try to obtain. Buy yourfirstnameyourlastname.com (ie: joesmith.com). You might want to differentiate between them and place a dash between the two (joe-smith.com). Get whichever one you think looks better.
Where should you buy the domain? There are a lot of places. You could buy from a Register.com, Godaddy, or any one of the many vendors out there. For a lot of actors though, price is a factor. Some domain vendors will charge between $25 and $45 US for domains. For the price of domain registration alone, I recommend using Netfirms for your domain registration. At $9.95 CDN, their price is one of the best (that’s just my opinion).
So. Go now and buy your name. We’ll talk about what you can do for your web site in a future post.