If you’re a free agent–such as a tech journalist who’s recently gone solo to freelance or a small business just getting its feet wet with online presence–you may well be baffled by the endless means of representing yourself online. Lord knows I was.

What I’ve found since launching the make-me-a-brand quest -lo- these 48 hours ago is that baby, you’re a fool if you pay for any of this stuff. At least, don’t pay a lot. You can get free branded e-mail from Google Apps (my new e-mail: lisavaas@lisavaas.com); tied into a blog and web page courtesy of WordPress‘ free blogging platform, tools and hosting.

To do the branding thing right, you should of course have your own domain name, and that’s where you’ll start spending money. A teensy bit of money, that is: Registering lisavaas.com cost $9.99 per year through GoDaddy. To have that lisavaas.com domain redirect to my site and blog, WordPress charges me $10.

These aren’t the only options, but they’re good ones, and they’re dead simple to set up once you get the hang of it.

Getting the hang of it wasn’t so easy, though. Setting up name servers and plugging in Google’s codes to enable branded e-mail to work with WordPress was not an intuititve process at first blush.

Luckily, through a stellar community for online journalists called the Internet Press Guild, I was fortunate enough to be showered with good advice that lead me to choosing this holy trinity of GoogleApps mail/GoDaddy domain/WordPress site and blogging platform.

One IPG member in particular, David Strom–who runs the incredibly helpful Your Personal Geek site–has put together  a 4-minute webcast that walks viewers through getting all the moving pieces in sync. I can’t recommend the webcast highly enough. Strom’s instructions take you step by step through what can be a baffling process. You can make it all work without watching the webcast, but with Strom’s help you’ll speed through what can be a slow and arduous search to figure out how to sync up all these moving pieces.

When it comes to branding yourself, don’t forget about social networking sites such as FaceBook or LinkedIn.  I tend to shy away from FaceBook given that I’m not entirely sure I want to see business colleagues in tutus, but then, I am a baby boomer. LinkedIn feels more grown-up, and it doesn’t have as much temptation to make a fool of myself–at least, not that I’ve discovered so far.

To maximize your social networking profile, beef up your network as much as possible. While importing your contacts is one good way to do this, *don’t* make the mistake of spamming your entire address book like I did. I wound up apologizing to:

• People interviewed for stories long ago
• People with whom I’d bartered for goods on Craig’s List
• Personal contacts
• Friends of friends
• Anybody else who wound up in my address book for reasons other than having long-term professional relationships (the only people I shoud have e-mailed in the first place).

In fact, I spammed so many inappropriate contacts that LinkedIn turned off my ability to invite new connections. I don’t blame them. It was obnoxoius–don’t make my mistake.

Here’s what you should do, though, to maximize LinkedIn:

• Edit your public profile URL to direct to your name (i.e., http://www.linkedin.com/in/lisavaas instead of a randomly assigned number)
• Copy LinkedIn’s HTML to get a personalized graphic button that you can paste into your blog and Web site to direct visitors to view your LinkedIn profile. You can see how this looks in the version I’ve posted on my About page
• Publish your profile to Google and other search engines.

I’m still learning how to brand myself, so please feel free to share with me your own strategies, feel free to give me feedback on this first site/blog, and good luck with turning yourself or your business into a brand.

Welcome to my new blog! After 12.5 years at eWEEK, I’m now free to help out with your tech writing needs. If you need a top-notch writer and editor who thoroughly understands the industry, from security to open source to virtualization to the meaning of deadlines, I’d be happy to chat. I’m available for freelance assignments or long-term work.

A huge shout-out to the good people at IPG (Internet Press Guild) for their help in getting this site together.