7 Steps to Building Your Personal e-Brand

Only recently did I start to embrace who I am Online, I finally did some of the steps I knew would help me in getting more client referrals from this blog (now happening), getting more feed subscribers (now happening) and increasing my sense of being on the internet. Even though I knew how I could improve all these things, I never did them for the fear of my Offline life being affected if anyone could easily track what I was up to. Not that I actually do anything to be ashamed or embarassed of and now I fully focus on Building My Personal e-Brand and my Internet life has changed so much for the better. Here’s how you can start to achieve more success online aswell:

1. Accept What You Do
By this I mean don’t be afraid of the whole world knowing what you do online, what you look like or being scared of your friends finding out about you and making a joke of it. Now that I dont care about these things the benefits are major and it actually feels like a huge weight lifted off your shoulders.

2. Profile Yourself
Get out there and have a page on your blogs or websites about who you really are, include some pictures and possibly some humerous or unique information people couldn’t find about you elsewhere. I think I do that well on this blog by simply having my full name on the posts and an image on the actual blog post pages.

3. Understand why you build your brand
If you dont have the understanding of why your building your brand then you wont realise how good it is to share yourself online. The reason your profile and brand online is important is that pictures and a name are about as personal as you can get to bring trust to others to visit your site. Trust leads to people buying your products or enquiring about your services. If you dont have a face or a name its often hard for people to trust you.

4. Become Involved in the Blog-O-Sphere
The Blogosphere is becoming the new media at an alarming rate so it’s good for you to get in their early, early is now. I started this blog a year ago and whilst I’ve never been a consistent writer like I finally am now, I’ve always been involved on linking to other blogs, commenting on other blogs and joining in their communities. This has helped me with business enquiries and traffic to my site that I wouldnt have had. And oh yeah, this is all because my name is really out there!

5. Be Real In Social Media
Social Media sites arent there for you to wade in, post some stories or give some thoughts and get tonnes of traffic and links back to your sites. They are social media sites because they are where people are supposed to be social and interact with each other. Really take the time to get involved in a community you are interested in and it will help your brand ten-fold.

6. Learn Your Subject So You can be an Expert to Others
If you are passionate about your subject, then its so much easier to happily read and learn about it, becoming an expert on the subject and sharing what you have learnt so you can be perceived as an expert to others. Seth Godin wasn’t always an expert marketer, Aaron Wall wasn’t always an amazing seo and John Chow wasn’t always an expert at making money online. Being seen as an expert on particular subjects will always build your brand online.

7. Be Your Own Person
You can decide on your own whether you think this blog post is good or bad. Whether I have personally learnt about building my online e-brand. I dont think I copy anyone in this industry, partly because I wouldn’t and partly because I am my own person. If you aren’t your own person and unique in someway, how can you stand out from the crowd and be memorable?

Personally…Im starting to see the affects of building my brand when my name gets mentioned and my blog posts get linked too, not just because I’m writing decent content. I hope my findings teach you something too…

10 Comments / August 21st, 2007 / Business