Setting up a personal brand isn’t always as easy as you would think. It’s not going to be as simple as choosing a name and just establishing it as your own brand, because there’s much more into it that you need to consider.
To help you set up a personal brand, why don’t we talk about the many different tactics I’ve picked up from some experts on the Internet. If I unfortunately missed on something important, do add it on the comment section later on.
Learn to listen
Listening will help you keep track of what people say about you, so why don’t you try these tips:
- Search for yourself, your brand, or your company through sites like Technorati or Google Blogsearch.
- Don’t hesitate to comment on blogs that talk about you and your entries.
- Check yourself out in Twitter or Friendfeed. You may find stray posts about you and your blog here.
- Save searches on Google Reader.
- Check link backs to your site through Yahoo! Site Explorer.
- Study how people relate to your site through heat map tools like Crazy Egg.
- Watch other people in your niche and learn from their posts.
- Read posts from leaders in other areas and look for ways to apply their ideas in your field.
- Watch other medias like podcasts or video seminars from sites like iTunes or YouTube for people who might be talking about you or your area of expertise.
- Always be aware of your audience’s sentiments to keep track of the results of your efforts.
Set up headquarters
Your home base is where you can provide your audience with reading or viewing materials. This can help you work your way into coming up with your personal brand.
- Put up your own blog. This will help get you started on developing your personal brand.
- When buying a domain name for your blog, choose a clever name that’s easy to recall and easy to relate to your content. Just remember not to be too clever in your choice of domain name.
- Pick a really nice blog layout. You can do it yourself or pay for it. Bottomline is, it’ll help show that you’re not just a social media dabbler.
- Write about you and your business on your about page. It is, after all, what the blog is all about – you and your business.
- Make commenting on your site easy for your readers..
- Make subscribing to your posts easier for your readers.
- Use a readable fonts style and color.
- Minimize your ads. If you feel the necessity to do so, match the ads on your site to what your audience may need.
- Be thoughtful about the widgets you include in your site. It can be fun to use them, but don’t overdo it.
- Register your blog with all the top search engines.
- Don’t forget to claim your site on Technorati.
- Observe your site’s load time. Make sure it doesn’t take forever to load your page.
- Use site grading tools to ensure that your blog is acceptable in Google’s eyes.
Use passports
These are accounts you make on social networking sites and social media platforms. Here are some sites you might want to sign up for:
- Twitter has a wide social media audience base. You’ll find potential customers as well as other thought leaders here.
- Facebook can be very useful for setting up an outpost.
- A Flickr account works great for photo sharing.
- You’ll need a YouTube account for video sharing.
- StumbleUpon or Digg accounts give you voting power for content.
- Del.icio.us accounts can be used for social bookmarking.
- You can sign up with WordPress for the OpenID benefits.
- LinkedIn serves as a professional social network.
- A Gmail account ultimately gives you access to multiple tools like Google Docs, Reader, Blog Search, etc..
Set up outposts
Outposts are meant to give your readers multiple ways to access your content.
- Incorporate RSS tools on. Add it to your Facebook or MySpace accounts.
- List all other social media sites you belong to on your LinkedIn profile.
- Promote with your email signature. Add your blog site link in it.
- List your blog and passports in all your social network profile and link them back to your sites.
- Use your social network accounts to share information.
- Sign up for Yahoo! Groups, Craigslist and other online forums.
- If you send out newsletters, always put a link to your blog on it.
- If you use other medias like podcasts of videos, always mention your blog site to draw them back to your site.
These are only three aspects that I’ve covered so far. I’ll talk about the other aspects that we need to cover next time. What do you think? Do you have any other tactics to add with regards to the above mentioned 4 topics? Do share your thoughts.
If you enjoyed this post or found it useful, please leave a comment or you can subscribe to our RSS feed for future posts
