Increase Your Brand with Gravatar
If you’ve spent any amount of time on the internet (and more specifically, communities and social networks) you’ve no doubt seen the icons that people use to graphically represent themselves. These little images are often called Avatars (no, not the blockbuster).
You can use your personal photo, a favorite picture, clip art, or even your book cover as your avatar on sites such as Facebook, Myspace, Yahoo, Blogger, etc.
Now, there’s an easier way to have an avatar and keep it updated on multiple sites. Introducing Gravatar. Okay, so Gravatar’s have been around a while. Where have you been?
So here’s what you need to know about Gravatar.
1) It’s awesome.
2) It’s free.
3) It associates your email address with an image of your choosing. (Psst… you can have gravatar remember multiple email addresses.)
- To get your free gravatar, go to gravatar.com and sign up for a free account. Make sure you use an email that you use often for things like blogs.
- Then, select a photo, clip art, or image you love. Upload it via the instructions there on the gravatar website.
- It will then ask you to crop your photo so that it’s a perfect square. Do that.
- Then save all your changes.
From now on, when you visit a Gravatar enabled website (like this one) your gravatar will show up next to your comments. And if you own the blog, you can set it up so that your gravatar shows up next to your posts as well.
Awesome, yes?
Best of all, three months from now when you get that awesome new haircut and want to change your avatar all you have to do is login to Gravatar.com, upload the new photo of your awesome self, recrop and save. Then your new image will show up across all the blogs/places you’ve visited/posted.
Double awesome.
So hop to it friends. There’s no more excuse for lack luster comments and posts. And wish Gravatar, you authors have one more chance to get your book cover in front of readers…all over the internet! Tell a friend. Spread the love.