Now that you’ve assembled a handful of .jpgs, you can start thinking about building an online portfolio. The advent of sites such as WordPress and Coroflot is it gives you a choice of templated websites ready for you to populate and crank up with relatively little to no web development skills needed. Basically, all the work is done for you!

I’ve noticed more and more writers using WordPress blogs to create an online presence. A blog can be a tremendously easy and effective method for writers to suddenly have a website. WordPress offers thousands (literally) of “skins” (a glorified way of saying “looks”) for you to choose from. A blog that showcases your professional work immediately assists you in promoting your brand and providing you with a 2010 URL to provide to your clients. You can create “tags” and “categories” to organize your work. For example, “Print Work” could be one category and “Interactive Work” could be another. Employing the use of tags such as “direct mail” or “banner ads” is a way to further categorize and organize your work. Using Snag-it will help you dress up your page by including screen-shots of your work and you can then upload the full-version as an attachment related to each post. It’s really a genius (easy, free) way for writers to build an online presence that you need in order to compete for writing jobs today. Did I mention it’s free? It’s free. All it takes is time.

Additionally, working within the content management system of a blogging engine provides you with in-demand CMS experience. Honestly, it’s a win-win.

Ok so you can’t necessarily just download software on a company-issued computer without getting approval or a company credit card but you can keep current by downloading on your home computer a super handy-dandy program Snag-it. Snag-it is the equivalent of taking a digital picture of your work as it appears online here and now and partnering with a decently-talented designer to crop it as you see fit. You can even insert content edits or call-outs as you see fit. Snag-it is a priceless tool for writers because it enables you to create .jpgs of your work which then enables you to create multi-page PDFs of your work. See where I’m going? You can use snag-it to help you start to build your online portfolio! It’s genius.

Prior to my gig with Artisan, I was a writer with a global consulting firm.  My work included writing online benefits content viewed by internal audiences of other global organizations. Let’s say I wasn’t penning Addy-winning pieces but the content was dense, information-heavy material spun to target a professional global audience. Most of my day was mired in uploading and organizing content using a content management system. I spent a year with this organization and it pained me to think about the negative impact the lack of creative work would have on my portfolio.

Fast-forward six years and here I sit at Artisan where daily I field requests from clients who want to see samples of precisely this type of content. Seriously! People want to see this stuff! Fortunately I had the foresight at my old job to familiarize myself with the organization’s copyright and presentation restrictions otherwise I’d have nothing to show for the previous year of employment.

The morale of this story isn’t ground-breaking; it’s a gentle reminder for writers to not only save your stuff, but print it. Get a cheap three-ring binder and print out screen shots of your work because future clients and hiring will want to see it no matter how mundane you think it is.

I’ve already written about the importance of familiarizing yourself with using various CMS tools and providing screen shots of your ability to work within them provides proof that yes, you can upload your writing to the web.