Tips for Building Your Brand on the Internet

Everyone has a personal brand. Your good name, your personal value proposition, your network and your career are all at least partially tied to your personal brand. Investing in your personal brand can be a powerful way to further all of these.

Career
If you are working in the corporate world it is obvious. According to a Career Builder survey nearly 50% of employers look for information about perspective employees online. An online presence strengthens what your sell in you resume and interview. This is so important into today's tough job market.

Your brand name may be valuable some day. If people value your opinion, information can be monetized in the future and you can plant seeds now to develop that down the road. For instance anyone who wants to write a book and develop an audience will find an online presence more and more critical to sucess as we move forward.

Networking
Just as building a brand is important to you, it is important to your network of friends, family, colleagues. Just look at Facebook, by strengthening your online brand, you are strengthening the brand of everyone your connected with, increasing the value of everyone in your network. It will a pretty powerful tool in the future and its importance will grow overtime.

Measuring Personal Brand Success
You aren't likely to see an impact right away if your not looking to build your online presence for monetization purposes. However it is easy to measure your online presence by googling your name and see how quick you can find yourself. With investment in your brand you should be able to see an improvement in your google results.

Even if you just spent 1 hr a year doing this, it can pay off. Planting seeds allows your network to build up overtime. Start by creating basic pages on one or two social bookmarking sites. Start to interlink them and link to people in your network and encourage them to do the same.

Some Examples of Good Branding

Penelope Trunk - say what you want about her, but she has created a great online awareness about her (true, it is what she touts in her writing).
New Book Authors - Look at Alan Corey, Tim Ferris, Chris Guillebeau (who has commented on this blog), etc. These folks have created pretty good brand awareness for obvious reasons - it helps bring publicity for their books or products.

Branding Basics
Start by establishing accounts on these sites:

Linkedin
Google profile
Facebook
Twitter
Other social networking sites including Windows Live pages and classmates.

Some other ideas to build your brand:

1)Register a domain name for your name. Create a web site or just hold onto the name for a future project.
2) When you comment on blogs like this one be sure to include a link to one of your branding pages.
3) Start a personal blog on blogspot.com or your own site.

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