Activating and populating an Enhanced Profile
Membership to the Learning Practitioners'
Association enables a trainer to have a profile on the TrainerBase web
site. As mentioned in previous articles there are 2 types of profile:
Basic and the Full Enhanced. The next few articles are going to provide
advice and guidance on activating and then populating an Enhanced
profile.
A word to the wise; our investigations have shown that
the Full enhanced profile offers significant advantages over Basic
profiles including:
Given that there is a huge amount of functionality
within the Full enhanced profile I will break this top tip into a number
of articles including:
-
Activating your profile, selecting a style and
starting editing pages.
-
Adding images and links.
-
Search engine optimisation
-
Resources, courses and programmes
Activating your profile
The first point to note is that when you take out a Full enhanced
profile, you will need to activate it. Until you do your profile will
remain a Basic pop up profile.
Assuming that you are logged in to Edit Profile and can see the wide
range of options you have available; in Section 1 you should click on
the Activate/Deactivate your profile link.
The following window will display a form showing:
- Profile Address
- Profile Terms
- Profile Status
The Profile Address is required as this creates what is called a
landing page for your profile. This will be the 'address' that you can
use to get visitors to visit your profile. The first part of the address
is already set - http://www.trainerbase.co.uk/vip/ , you need to fill in
the field after this. If your business was called Acme Training you
could add 'Acme' to the field. This would result in your profile address
being
http://www.trainerbase.co.uk/vip/acme .
Given that you are in business it is highly advisable to include
Terms on your profile. You can do this at a later date if you so wish
but bear in mind that if a purchaser finds you via your TrainerBase
profile and you have not declared your terms, they can impose their
terms on you.
The Profile Status enables you to control whether your Full enhanced
profile is 'visible'. I would advise that in the early stages of
populating your profile you keep the Status at 'Inactive (TrainerBase
Standard)'.
Before you can do anything you need to click on the 'Update your
profile' button. This sets up the requirements on the system that
enables you to add details to your profile.
Selecting a Style
Currently there are 2 'Styles' for Full enhanced profiles (there are
more on the way). The default style is the 'white/grey' style, if you
wish you can have a look at what this and the other 'black/green' style
looks like by clicking on the 'Select a style for
your profile' link, then click on the
'...>>' preview button. It is worthwhile remembering the
preview option as it will enable you to see what you profile looks like
as you start to populate it before you set it to Active. If you want to
change a style, select the one you want from the drop down list and
click on the 'Apply style >>' button.
Start editing pages
One of the key benefits of the Full enhanced profile is the ability
to add text, pictures, tables, links and more to the pages of your
profile. This significantly improves the amount of content and
aesthetics of the profile you present to purchasers but as important, it
increases your search engine optimisation and rankings.
Be aware that
www.trainerbase.co.uk gets over 15,000 search engine robots indexing
the site each month. Many of these robots get to index member profiles.
Click on the Edit pages of your profile
link and please read the notes on this page as this will help you with
populating your profile. In the 'Select a page' drop down list, choose
the 'Title & Main heading' and click 'Edit'. The 2 fields available are:
- Profile Heading; this is the heading that appears at the top of
each of your profile pages. Taking the Acme example you could put
Acme Training Solutions in this field, and
- Home page title; this is the title that appears at the top of
the main part of your home page.
Once you have filled in these fields click on the 'Update Page >>'
button (and the OK in the message box).
The next step is to start adding text to some of your pages. In the
'Select a page' drop down list, choose the 'Home Page' and click 'Edit'.
The window that appears contains a basic web page editor. At a most
fundamental level you can start typing into this text editor. The
toolbar offers some basic formatting functionality such as size,
justification, bold, italic and colours. And for those of you who know a
little bit about Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) there is the option to
amend the html code of what you have entered into the text box. A word
of warning; do not copy and paste from Microsoft Word or other word
processor. If you are going to construct your page in another
application, then please use an HTML editor such as FrontPage or
Dreamweaver.
Once you have got some introduction text into your Home page click on
the 'Save' button. This now means that you have some text on the home
page of your profile. Do go to the 'Select a style
for your profile' again to see what your profile will look like
to purchasers and if you are happy; you can now set your profile to
Active. Go to the 'Activate/Deactivate your
profile' link and change the Profile Status to 'Active
(Enhanced)' and click on the 'Update Profile >>' button.
Now you can let people know that your Enhance profile is active on
TrainerBase.
In the next article I will go into more depth about how you can
populate your profile with images and links; the latter being of great
importance in getting those search engine robots indexing your profile
and your own web site.
If there is anything else you would like to know about what the
Association is doing to benefit its members please feel free to contact us.
