You may be one of the best IT consultants in town, but if no one knows about you, it’s impossible to ever be successful. So how exactly do you build a reputation?

The obvious (and most simplistic) answer is to do good work. You should also: be honest and responsible; solve actual problems instead of imagined ones; look out for your client’s best interests; and complete each job. Every time you follow these basic tenets of being a good IT consultant, your reputation improves.

As the Billie Holiday song “God Bless The Child” goes, them that’s got shall get — but what if you’re one of them that’s not? Here are six strategies that can give your IT consulting career a leg up.
#1: Word of mouth

Most of my clients learned about me by word of mouth; this is the oldest and, in my opinion, the most effective channel. Think about all the people who know about your abilities: former employers, former coworkers, classmates from college, and current and former clients. Ask some of them if they’ll give you a recommendation, or if they know anyone who is looking for an IT consultant. (Do not cold call or spam people you don’t know, or send uninvited copies of your resume without a recommendation from someone the client already knows. It’s a waste of time.)
#2: Specialize

A number of readers of the TechRepublic IT Consultant blog consider themselves “jacks-of-all-trades,” but the continuation of that saying holds a lot of truth: “master of none.” You may cultivate a reputation for being the go-to guy or gal to fix any problem that comes up, but you can only take that role so far. To really drive up your demand, become an expert in one specific area. You should select a topic/field that you’re passionate about because you need to immerse yourself in it day and night. Ideally, you want to know practically everything you can about the topic and be able to contribute your innovations, while maintaining a good general knowledge of all related fields.
#3: Web site

You must have an Internet presence — you’re in IT for crying out loud. When potential clients search online to find authoritative help, you want them to be able to find you. Web sites that are updated frequently (such as blogs) tend to get a better search engine ranking. Blogs are great for another reason: You can establish a level of authority on a specific topic by researching and frequently writing about it. If people who are considered authorities in your field start linking to you, this enhances your authority.
#4: Conversation

Read blogs and forums that discuss your specialty (and related topics) and comment frequently. Link to them from your blog, and make sure you pingback or trackback so that your thoughts get included in the conversation. The more you think about and discuss your specialty with others in the field, you’ll build a better reputation — and rightly so, because you will have learned a lot in the process.
#5: Free samples

If you really want to convince people of your worth, post examples of your work on your Web site. This doesn’t apply very well to networking or security consultants, but it really works for software. If people learn something from your site, and they use it, like it, and marvel at the simple elegance of its design, they’ll probably want to hire you for related projects in the future.
#6: Insider

The ultimate level of reputation you can achieve is to be the person who helped create the technology the client wants to use. While this may disqualify some potential clients because they can’t afford your price, it’s a nice problem to have. Believe me, there will be plenty of other clients who can’t get enough of you. Insider status used to be extremely difficult to achieve in packaged software — it still is for proprietary software, where you basically have to be an employee or a long-term contractor to gain that experience. If you get involved in an open-source project, you can easily become an insider on one of the products that drive development these days. Pick your product well, though, because you’ll be spending a lot of time working with it.

Well, I was little busy with real world issues and cannot blog for some time now, to add insult to the injury, My hosting company made a terrible mistake and misplaced my domain renewal agreement and as a result the site was offline for more than 5 days!!

I am some pro!

Ok back to the matter at hand, I was mindlessly going thru the cnet RSS feed(or was it atom??) and came across this piece An end to the Google bonus fairytale?

Gosh, I’ve known friends in google India make more than $5000 in annual bonus, now people working in BAy area to get a mobile phone for Bonus…

That will be some day, huh…This surely is an economic meltdown…

The article follows.

For Googlers eagerly awaiting their famous holiday bonuses, be warned: Santa is tightening his belt too.

Google employees, some of whom have reportedly grown used to fairytale-like cash bonuses on the north side of $20,000, apparently got coal in their stockings this year. Certainly that’s the takeaway for gossip blog Valleywag, which in a headline likened this year’s bonus to “dogfood”–a euphemism for in-house testing–because Google would like some feedback.

So how bad was it? Well, Google gave its employees a smartphone. Yep, can you believe it? Man, if I had a nickel for all the years my bosses gave me a smartphone…

But I digress. Back to Google’s gift. Apparently, Valleywag took issue with Google giving its employees an Android–its own phone! Well, actually, the memo that Valleywag reprinted referred to it as a “Dream phone.” It’s basically the T-Mobile G1 that retails for $179.99, but it’s been customized to “work anywhere in the world” on the carrier of their choice. (Google estimates its value at $400.)

The nerve!

Here, in the real world, while many in the tech industry have received pink slips, Google employees are receiving a gift–oh, yeah, it is a gift–that many people would love to find under their trees. What a bummer, man. As far as the dogfooding goes, I am guessing that this company that has a reputation for being astoundingly generous when economic realities were more positive isn’t going to can employees for not sending back the questionnaire.

Now, back to the topic of Santa…

“Two years ago, illegal use of professionally created video was rampant on the Web, particularly on video sharing sites such as YouTube. Among those most visibly undercut were NBC Universal and Viacom, which filed a $1 billion suit against YouTube parent Google to stop illicit publishing of their content.”

Now, a year after YouTube introduced its Video Identification tool to stem misuse, there seems to be a considerable decrease in the illicit videos online.

For more details, head to TechRepublic and see & hear Rick Cotton, the general counsel for NBC, on how automated systems for identifying and protecting professionally produced content are working, particularly at YouTube.

well, Sorry guys it has almost become a fetish for me to follow and write about Chrome and If you had followed my blog or any technology post for that matter , a hailstorm is averted coz’ of Google License and rights use.

And as you probably know by now, The Bundesrepublik Deutschland was really worried about the Data Collection policies of Chrome and went as far as issuing an advisory as to not use Chrome for critical usage.

So its natural to see a German GmBH taking the initiative to weed out the concerns.

Enter Iron: 
Developed by German software company SRWare is Chrome stripped of all the user ID information that gave the German government cause for concern. According to them, Iron is essentially the Chromium source code, with the following modifications

• No unique user-ID
• No user-specific information is sent to Google
• No alternative error messages
• Crash information is not sent to Google
• No Google updater