Your Personal Brand
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Here’s a quick introduction to building a brand based around you.
Personal Branding is complex field of marketing and branding that would take an entire book to explain, but I would like to give you a few tips as to how to build your own brand.
What is a Personal Brand
Your personal brand is how people ientify with you. You may be the “geeky tech blogger” or the “creative photoshop genius”. Your brand consists of your blog posts, tweets, videos, photos and even the links you save on Del.icio.us.
Be Yourself, Be Open
You can use an alias online, but this will weaken your brand and make you harder find. I use the same username for most of my social accounts, that same username is the name of my blog and is indexed in Google – People see my username and know its me! Its also important to be yourself. When writing blog posts or tweets etc. don’t take on an alter ego as people see straight through this.
Be Social
Create a Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr, Youtube, Del.icio.us, Digg and Facebook account. Your website used to be your homepage. Now its spread across all of these sites. Its also very important to use these sites properly. Many people fail on Twitter by simply posting links back to their blog. This just annoys the community. The same can be said for all other social networks.
Yes, you should be using all of those sites. If you think they are useless its due to ignorance rather than actually believing they are duds.
Copy The Best
Take a look at Kevin Rose, Robert Scoble and Michael Arrington. They all have strong personal brands. So its a good idea to look at what they are doing and copy. And yes, that does require passion and commitment. All three of those guys love what they do….and it shows.
Join In
Comment, Comment and Link. When I see a cool article I link to it. All my profiles are linked so posting it to Delicious will distribute it out to my network. Giving link love (to quality content) is your most powerful marketing tool – so don’t underestimate it.
And once again – don’t bother talking about yourself and your content on Twitter, FriendFeed or your blog. Limit posts about your own ventures to 3 per month, max!
For more of my content check out my blog feint.me – or follow me on Twitter.
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4 Comments on this post
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Dan Schawbel said:
Anthony, great introduction into personal branding. I believe you hit some of the big points with this post. I especially like you how you talk about “learn from the best.” Too many people think they know-it-all, when really they don’t. If you follow best practices, then you won’t make the same mistakes over and over again.
September 21st, 2008 at 11:31 am -
Anthony said:
Glad you enjoyed the article Dan.
September 21st, 2008 at 11:13 pm -
pays to live green said:
This is definitely the best way to market yourself and to get a following. If you find your niche and people begin to refer to you as the expert in that niche, you can really take off. Thanks for the great post.
October 1st, 2008 at 6:14 am -
sikatang pinoy said:
hope to give my readers stuff they can use to build solid traffic; things that will give their sites real growth.
December 26th, 2009 at 10:18 pm