Register Your Username on Social Media Sites & get Backlinks

 Be a TOP user on a bagillion social sites! OK, maybe just a user

One of the first things I’d recommend doing after launching your site (or even right after you come up with your brand name) is to go out and register your username on the top social media sites. This is great for both reputation management and to start participating in relevant communities.

One awesome tool to see if your brand name or desired username is available is KnowEm.com (Knowem Review). It’s a free username lookup tool for hundreds of sites. You can also pay them to go out do the leg work for you on over 100 sites (which is great since it takes a LOT of time to do this manually). More on that later.

If you think hundreds of sites might be overkill (or would consume your whole next month) I would recommend you get usernames for these sites, listen in what I think is the order of most importance:

Twitter
Youtube
Flickr
Delicious
Stumbleupon
Facebook (not a username, but setup a page. You need at least 25 fans before you can choose a vanity username/url for your page)
Digg
Ustream
Reddit
MySpace (I put it last on the list because I think it sucks – but hey, it’s still popular)
A few top niche sites that are in your category (you can find them here: 10e20, Tropical SEO, Vladimir’s Alexa list, Dosh Dosh, KnowEm, Wikipedia)
LinkedIn if you are a individual. More info on LinkedIn Marketing.
I used Knowem for abroadening.com earlier this year – the $99 plan. It saved me a lot of time, but I also had to click over 100 confirmation emails and unsubscribe to some of the newsletters a few of the registrations signed me up for.

This time around – for hotshotphoto I went with the $250 corporate plan for the full knowem service. They upload your photos, complete bios, and take care of all the email confirmations.

If you’re boostrapping this thing and don’t want to spend the money, go ahead and register with the sites above yourself. It just takes a lot more time. At the bare minimum register for Twitter and Youtube and get a Facebook fan page together.