Great Ways to become a Personal Brand Online

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Guest post from Ben Johnson of LogoInn, custom logo design.

Personal branding is gaining popularity as it is opening doors to everyone who wants to benefit out of it in one way or the other. Recession is knocking everywhere and there are a lot of layoffs in many companies including the big ones as well. No one feels protected and there is no job security for anyone. Under such circumstances, I don’t need to wonder why people are putting their efforts in creating personal profiles online.

Personal branding has become very essential, you need to differentiate your brand in terms of your expertise/ knowledge, and social media provide that platform and power to reach out to people online and create a powerful and long lasting personal brand. Why it has become so important is because of the fact that you can portray your talents and goals to people who are pertinent to catering your purpose of personal branding.

There are countless ways you can create, communicate and maintain your personal brand. Doing so would help you out if you are in process of job switch, or if you are a recruiter of any company. Here are some golden ways to start off with:

Create a Blog

Blogging is a good way of creating your brand online. There are numerous blogging platforms where you can sign up. You can quick start by:

• Buying a domain name
• Creating a theme
• Compiling content
• Constructing your ‘About Us’ page

Make sure your blog domain is easy to remember and your theme should be according to what you are going to put up on your blog. For instance, if your interests and expertise are in the field of logo designing, your theme should be creative and has to have colors and designs incorporated in it. Moreover, assemble content relevant to your theme. Your content should be original, bold and should offer something unique in order to increase your readers. It is the most essential thing that has to be kept in mind while blogging, you can only stand out through your content. Be sure, whatever you write has to be authentic. And yes, don’t forget to include ‘Comment’ section and ‘RSS’ to your blog. Create an ‘About Us’ page in which you can give a brief description of yourself, your interests, your hobbies etc. Make sure your blog is well-defined for the search engines.

Once you’ve started blogging, you need increase the number of readers on your blog. You can successfully do so by updating your content regularly with quality and relevant content. Your knowledge and awareness in the area of your interest would be the gauging factor of how successful you are as a brand.
Enhance your online presence

Your job is not done here. Your efforts would be wasted even if you’re successful in creating a wonderful blog for yourself, unless you register your blog with the available blogs and web directories, claim with Technorati.com, and use Google Reader to store your searches. You need to increase your online presence. Hence, it is a good practice to get your blog easily indexed in different search engines. Check regularly who is linking back to you through Yahoo! Site Explorer. Also, building connections with the experts by commenting on other blogs within your area of expertise would certainly be of great help.

Do successful branding on social networking websites

Besides blogging you can sign up to various social networking websites. The most popular ones are:
• Twitter.com which connects you to other social media practitioners
• Facebook which connects you to other social media practitioners
• MySpace which could be used for outpost and to stay in touch with friends; find new ones
• LinkedIn for professional networking which helps in exploring business opportunities and getting advices from experts no matter where you are
• Flickr for photo sharing
• YouTube for video sharing
• Digg for voting on articles, pictures, audio, video etc.
• StumbleUpon for voting on articles, pictures, audio, video etc.
• Upcoming.org for events updates
• Gmail for docs, readers and more.

Creating accounts on all these would certainly give you instant recognition on social media. On top of it, creating groups on social networking platforms would give you an easy mechanism for communicating with lots of people in one go.

Networking should be aggressive

Once you are on all the networking platforms, start interacting with relevant people. People who have similar interests and expertise. Gain knowledge from them and share yours. Allow them to reach you easily and make your availability most of the time. Interacting with them would make your network feel that you are active online and this would help you increase your brand’s credibility. Plus, your healthy participation would expand your networks.

I have shared my knowledge regarding how to create your personal brand through social media. Share in the comments section, if you have more to add to it.

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Tags: Digg, Facebook, google, google reader, LinkedIn, MySpace, StumbleUpon, youtube