While there can be advantages to outsourcing your online persona in this manner, there can be possible disadvantages as well. As someone creating an online presence, you should be sure that you understand what you want to use your personal site for (if indeed you even choose to have one amid the sea of social networking sites). Social sites often let you create a profile where you provide links to personal sites--these can help drive traffic to your personal page. Likewise, providing links to these social sites on your personal page can drive traffic to these external representations of you.

Ultimately, these two types of sites--personal and social--can balance each other out and drive more traffic and attention to you than you might otherwise have experienced if you were to forgo one of the options. However, the more you outsource, the more potential for less traffic to your personal site, and if this is where you house the most important content, you might see smaller readership.

You might also want to consider the implications of giving up direct control of the hosting of your content and what it means if these external sites were to change their policies or suffer a major outage. The more sites you sign up for, the more you have to keep up with in terms of updating, which might be cumbersome depending on how many social sites you use.

A reader in the comments of this blog entry did make a good point though in stating that giving out a personal URL somehow doesn't have the same weight that it used to. In a time where virtually everyone has their own Myspace or Facebook account, people want like to respond with like. For the average person, these social sites are sufficient--there is no need to bother with HTML and creating a custom site. It's also that much more effort to remember a personal URL than it is to know that you can look someone up later on Facebook and friend them.

Is there a need for an average person to have a personal site anymore, or is it completely redundant when the info can be found on multiple social networking sites? Should one keep all content in-house, or outsource it to other sites such as Flickr, Del.icio.us, Myspace, Youtube, etc.? I for one have not formulated a definite answer to these questions, but I would love to hear any opinions on the matter!

But how do you create the content that leads to a viral article, especially when your business is less than exciting?

Esoos Bobnar over at SearchEngineNews.com recently published a great article on how to create online article content that will build links and increase search engine rankings.

Web surfers today have very short attention spans and are looking for information that either solves a specific problem or entertains them. Esoos breaks down 3 common elements of successful articles that generate a large amount of incoming links:

Lists + Instructional + Catchy/Descriptive Title = Good chance for incoming links.

You can't turn on the TV or look at a magazine these days without seeing some sort of list - Top 50 this or Top 10 that - it only makes sense to use this same element in your online articles. Lists are short, easily digestible pieces of information that draw people in. Instructional lists are popular since they are offer a valuable learning experience (How to...). A good example of the is the the Make Magazine Blog which has made its way to the homepage of del.icio.us. Finally the title is key since most web surfers quickly scan article titles and quickly make a snap judgment. Your title is your 3 second audition to hook the reader, get them to spend some time with your article and then blog about it on their own site.

Getting started with some good content creation is only part of the equation, check out our Article Marketing Services to help guide your writing efforts and promote your articles through leading online article marketing networks (for RSS syndication) and user generated content sites (Digg, Del.icio.us)

The largest barrier to good blogging is having good listening skills. In the online world these listening skills involve using a set of scouting tools such as Technorati, IceRocket, Google Alerts, Moreover.com pulling the data into a RSS reader and analyzing the conversation.

We found that people just getting into blogging, are quickly overwhelmend with the process of listening to the conversation, entering the conversation and capturing the conversation.

This is why we set up our "Getting Started" online video tutorials to take someone through the entire process of setting up a RSS reader, a Blogger blog, a Delicious account, how to post to blog, setting trackbacks, commenting on other's blogs, submitting an RSS feed, etc.

Eric's HP Blog