Karen Rubin's Ramblings

In less than two weeks after launching Karen-Rubin.com I made the first page of Google for term Karen Rubin! Honestly I thought it was going to be a little more challenging, but I am not complaining.

Check out my rise to page #1. The green line is Karen-Rubin.com and the red is my other site, Gormandizing.com. The yellow is KarenRubin.com, the site I am trying to knock out of the first position. 

My strategy for getting to the first position, which I do expect to take longer, is to keep adding content regularly! I am planning for a couple of posts a week minimun and hoping to get at least one per day. Hopefully I can find interesting things to say every day!

It took just over a week, but today something MOMENTUS happened. Google officially found Karen-Rubin.com! As you can see from the HubSpot screen shot below, I am ranking #39 for the search term "karen rubin" and #71 for the search term "karen-rubin".

It's interesting that I am ranking higher for the term that is not my URL, but that's probably because I don't refer to myself as karen-rubin very often on the blog. In any case, I'll keep working to move myself up in the ranks and hopefully one day be able to claim domination!

Tomorrow afternoon I will be at the MITX Digital Combine for a couple hours helping to recruit ROCKSTARS for HubSpot. The Digital Combine is a place where

"Job seekers have the opportunity to attend a series of afternoon panels designed specifically to educate them with the skills they need to stay competitive in today's market and meet with participating companies who will be showcasing their capabilities and talking about current or future individuals in the digital industry."

It sounds like a pretty cool event. You can get help with your resume or meet people from a vareity of companies. There are also a vareity of sessions on managing your personal brand and interview tips and techniques. 

If you are looking for work in Boston, I would say showing up is a no-brainer. Come say "Hi!" while you are there as well. 

Yesterday Google took a step towards making their profiles more helpful by launching Google Me. If you go and type "Me" into Google, you will get the option to set up your profile (you can also go to here). Once set up, your profile will show at the bottom of the search results. 

Who knows what this means for now, but I am going to guess that it's a great move for personal branding. They allow you to include your Gmail name as the URL, so my Google Profile URL is, http://www.google.com/profiles/Karen.Roy. I was a bit bummed that I couldn't change this to Karen Rubin at first, but I should have known Google would figure it out. When you search for Karen Rubin, my Karen.Roy Google Profile does show up. Smart folks over there at Google. 

Over at Mashable there is some concern about the amount of information this allows Google to know about you. I have to admit, I gave up that battle a while ago and fully embrace Google knowing all there is about me. When they take over the world, perhaps they will be nicer to people who have supported their domination.

I spend plenty of time talking about personal branding on the video podcast I host with Mike Volpe, HubSpot.tv, but up until this morning hadn't created a site to help with my personal branding!

I hesitated because the domain I wanted, KarenRubin.com was taken by a talented photographer in Colorado. I have slowly been working my way up the Google rankings for the term "Karen Rubin" and my Twitter account, Linked In profile and foodie blog now show on the first page. I knew I didn't stand a chance of getting the coveted #1 position as long as I didn't have a domain that was at least close to the search term. 

I finally realized having something was better than nothing, and thus the birth of Karen-Rubin.com.  I hope to use this as a place to share interesting things I am learning and doing at inbound marketing powerhouse HubSpot.com. The goal is to continue building my brand and ultimately take over the number 1 place on Google for people searching Karen Rubin. 

 If you don't have your personal domain locked in, now is the time to go buy it. Perhaps you aren't ready to start a site, but you don't want to wait until you are only to find out someone else has snagged the URL!