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There may be no business like show business but professional performers can certainly borrow techniques from other industries to promote themselves. Just like the real world, new media is all about building lasting relationships. Use the tips below to help turn the web from a way to while your time off to finding your next big gig.

Here are my top tips for how actors and professional perfomers should promote themselves using New Media:

1. Buy your own .com

Actors are increadibly lucky in the way that the industry protects stage names, with uniqueness guaranteed by Spotlight and Equity. Once you have your stage name registered, or even before you sign on the dotted line, check if yourname.com is available. If it is – jump on it! We’ll come back to what you should do with your domain name once you’ve bought it, but the most important thing is to make sure its you that controls it. There is a common misconception that domain names are expensive. They’re not! A .com domain can be bought from sites like GoDaddy.com for as little as £6.35 a year and are an invaluable tool for self promotion. For as long as you continue to pay an annual fee, you have complete control over that domain.

Why a .com and not a .co.uk? The .com is the ubiquitous and definitive top level domain the world over. It has strength across international borders and is a stronger marketing tool, being first in the minds of consumers. If your .com is already taken then .co.uk is certainly the best option for UK based performers, it also appears professional and ties your website to your location. Just remember that as a professional performer you do have the potential to work internationally and become an international brand.

If the .com of your stage name has already been taken there are a few things to think about when choosing alternatives. Hyphenated domains such as your-name.com are an option although it makes the site name harder to read out loud and may become a hindrance. Visitors may also forget to include the hyphens taking them to the wrong site and you back to square one.

So there are a few things to consider when choosing your domain name. The important thing is, if your .com is available then get out there and buy it. It is by far the cheapest and easiest investment to make in your online personal brand.

2. Make sure that you own your own name on Social Media sites

In the same way that it is important to protect your stage name by buying your .com name you should also make sure that you have control over your name on the social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Myspace. You may not choose to use the networks once you have joined but by simply signing up you then have control over how the name is used. Make sure that you sign up for accounts on all the major social networks and get web addresses like twitter.com/yourname, myspace.com/yourname and facebook.com/yourname.

To find out whether your name has already been taken on a vast collection of social networks check out NameChk.com, a service which queries almost all social networks at once for availability. Many you may never have heard of and might not see any value in taking the time to sign up to, just remember that many social networks which do not have a huge amount of traction in the UK are as common abroad as the likes of Facebook here.

It is worth registering for a number of social networks. The majority of sites ask for the same information so you can copy and paste things like your interests and experience between sites. Remember not to list too many personal details online. You may want to list your day and month of birth so that your friends are alerted of your birthday but also listing the year will make you an easy target for identity theft.

3. Set up a basic website to promote yourself

Having bought your own .com name the next step is to set up a website. As well as being a fantastic place to promote yourself and projects you are working on using simple tools you can have benefits like appearing in seach engine results. There are tonnes of sites out there that will let you build your own website for free. Easy options include Google Sites and Weebly.com. Make sure that you include your name in the title of the site you create to raise your search engine ranking when people put your name into Google.

When setting up your site you will be given the opportunity to use your own domain name as the address. This might involve changing the settings at your domain name registrar (I suggested GoDaddy above) but services like Google Sites will guide you step by step through the process.

Remember when setting up your website and social networking presence to keep things professional. If you want to advertise yourself as a serious professional consider using your headshot as your profile picture across the web and think about what you post or write online. At every stage of the process you have choices to make about how professional you want your online presence to be. You don’t have to go over the top or come across like a robot but imagine your mum is reading every tweet and you’ll probably be on the right lines.

4. Regularly update

Use a News section on your website to tell people about projects you are involved in. If shows you are involved in get positive press coverage then linking to articles can be a great way of promoting yourself. Most free website builders will also let you add a photo gallery giving you somewhere to display show photos, headshots and scanned press clippings.

Having joined a number of social networks its realistic, and probably most valuable to regularly update just one or two. If you are already active on Facebook and want to use it on a professional basis it might be worth linking it with other services, meaning that you get twice or three times the chance of exposure with the same amount of work. To link together your Facebook and Twitter you can use applications like Selective Twitter Status. If you want to post updates across losts of social networks at once then have a look at services like Ping.fm which let you type one message and have it cross posted across just about every network you might want to be on.

5. Be active in the online community

This might sound scary but it really doesn’t have to be. Just like networking face to face, online networking is about forming relationships. Each social network and corner of the web works slightly differently but there are lots of simple ways to raise your profile and engage with others online.

Start reading blogs of people you are interested in and meaningfully comment on their posts, it can spark or contribute to debate and most blogs let you link your comments back to your own site, raising your own profile.

If someone you follow on Twitter or elsewhere posts an interesting link then repost it and give them credit by including their twitter ID in your post. This is called retweeting and Twitter is slowly rolling out more support for it.

Seek out interesting articles online from newspapers, blogs or other sources and share links to them with your friends and followers.

Make sure that you connect with people online that you know in real life. Most social networks let you import your address books from Gmail and Hotmail so that might be an easy way to quickly check who you know that’s using a site or service like Twitter. How well you know different people should influence how you use different networks – if get tagged on raucous nights out on your Facebook account you might not want to be friends with potential agents but following them on Twitter might give you the right level of interaction to promote yourself and build that professional relationship.

These are just a few examples of how actors and other professional performers can promote themselves online. What do you do to engage with other people in the industry? Are you on Twitter? Do you own your own .com? Let me know. Start the debate below.

Photo credit: FreeFotoUK on Flickr

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 9:46 pm and is filed under Actors, New Media, Professional Performers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.