10 Personal Branding Secrets you have never heard before
(Dan Schawbel – managing partner of Millennial Branding LLC and leading authority in personal branding)
1. Multiple Website Strategy
Having multiple websites allows you to gain more control over both your online brand presence and your market.
Creating these multiple websites is like purchasing apartments in the game of Monopoly: the more you own, the wealthier you are.
It is recommended that you purchase the following domain names:
· FullName.com [ex. VictoriaRose.com]
· Topic.com [ex. PersonalBranding.com]
· TopicBlog.com [ex. PersonalBrandingBlog.com]
· TopicTv.com [ex. PersonalBrandingTV.com]
Each of these websites should serve a purpose:
· FullName.com – use this website as your online resume
· Topic.com – use this website to demonstrate your knowledge on a topic
· TopicBlog.com – use this website to write/co-write articles weekly
· TopicTV.com – use this website to publish video interviews
*Reserve domain names even if you’re not going to turn them into websites so you can protect your personal brand and your business.
2. Magic publicity Formula
Research, subscribe, and build relationships with the media regularly if you want to become well known, respected and wealthy.
1. Research: review all forms of media to see who covers your topic, including TV, radio, magazines, blogs, podcasts and other online sites.
2. Subscribe: subscribe to Google alerts, blogs, and traditional websites where journalists are producing content around your topic
3. Build Relationships: read incoming articles carefully, search for the journalists name in Google to grab their email address for tour response, and then send them an idea they might not have thought of or an opinion. If you can’t find their email address, go to their company’s press room, find the email address of a PR contact to see how their email is contracted and then reproduce it. [Ex. ABC news – FirstName.LastName@abc.com].
4. Other suggestions: Interview journalists as a way to promote their own brand, without asking for coverage first. Keep running a tab on the journalists that respond positively to your email using an Excel Worksheet. Be a resource to them, even when you don’t fit in their story by locating sources and examples that will help them complete their stories.
*Create goodwill with your public so that journalists want to interview again and again.
3. Outsource Your Brand Design
· Don’t get attached to the fonts, colours, sizes, and the overall design and structure of your marketing materials because it’s probably not serving your audience.
· We have our own biases over our work, so it better to have an outside opinion looking in.
· By outsourcing your design work, you’re able to have a more professional brand that’s respected by your audience.
· Where you can go to get your design:
o 99Designs – for crowd sourced website, blog, and logo design
o Taste of link studios – for remarkable business cards with silk, gloss, foil, rounded corners, and more, to make your brand stand out.
o Unique Blog Designs – for custom WordPress blog designs.
o Sharp Slide – for personalised PowerPoint templates and stationary.
o Russell Wyner – for flash websites and 3D animation.
o eLance – for all of your design needs.
*Instead of investing your time in learning to be an artist, hire a group of professionals that can turn your dream into a reality.
4. Strategic Brand Association
· You are probably not famous, but you can become famous if you start associating your name with people who are more successful than you are.
· Brands open the doors to success
o If someone hasn’t heard your name before, you need a brand to back your credibility up.
o Potential clients, conference organizers, and the media would rather work with, hire, and interview people who work for leading brands or renowned experts
· How to build brand association
1. Review your professional network to see if you’re connected to anyone who is successful and respected by society
2. Start a project with this person, interview them, or volunteer to help them
3. Ask them for an endorsement, and an introduction to someone in their network who is more successful than they are. You can review their LinkedIn and Facebook contacts to find someone.
4. Repeat this process
*Leverage other brands to connect with bigger brands, and the leverage those to get even bigger brands.
5. Intern Content Creators
· Most successful people won’t tell you who they have behind the scenes: interns.
· Unpaid internships are common these days
o Students can’t get jobs unless they have internship experience
o Students can earn course credit from their colleges or universities
o Students have networks of their own that can support your cause, including their college administration, and fellow students
· You can’t scale your brand, so don’t try
o Review your entire platform, which could include a website, blog, social network profiles, a wiki, etc.
o Decide what your strength is, what tools you know you have to be active on, but can’t allocate time to.
o Assign one or more interns to help you distribute targeted content by empowering them and watching over them for a few weeks
· How to bring fresh interns onboard
o Understand what your key objectives are, how many hours a week you need the intern, and if they can work remotely or not.
o Create a job description for that internship, including how long the internship goes for, their key activities, and the benefits they will receive by enrolling.
o Use your current network to fish for interns, by sending out a tweet, updating your Facebook and LinkedIn account, sending a note to your mailing list, putting the opening on your site, and the tell people you are looking for an intern in your day to day business activities.
*Students love the internet and are hungry for work experience, which gives them enough of a reason to want to work for you for free.
6. Build Other People’s Brands
· The best way to become successful is to make others successful first
· Start focusing on how to help other people, build their brands, and make them rich because they will return the favour
· Strategies:
o Write about other people, link to their website and interview them.
o Become a connector by introducing two people who could mutually benefit each other
o Collaborate a project and give them a percentage of the revenue generated
o Send them an endorsement if you trust them
*Its far easier to build relationships, and your brand, when you help other people first.
7. Become a Marketable Product
· The easiest way to be successful is to already be successful
· How to become more marketable so people will want to hire you, do business with you and hire you:
1. Be extremely knowledgeable in your field
2. Actively seek endorsements from management, and clients
3. Select a niche and specialize in a market with no saturation
4. Build relationships with the media and do them favours because one press mention can make you extremely marketable
5. Put written and video testimonials on your website
6. Let other people promote you by asking for referrals
7. Dress professionally yet uniquely
8. Have confidence in yourself
*The easier it is for people to promote and sell you, the more money and attention you’ll receive.
8. Start Small then Spread Your Wings
· The biggest misconception with personal branding is that you won’t make as much money if you take a niche. People immediately think that a niche means a smaller audience
· Why you need to start small
1. If you don’t take a niche then people won’t know about you
2. By starting small, you can buy yourself enough time to be able to handle the mass market, both employees wise and emotionally
3. There’s no such thing as an overnight success, so your best bet is to start small so you cab gradually increase your presence
· How to spread your wings once you’re positioned
1. If your positioning contains a specific audience, shorten it.
2. Challenge all of your marketing materials with your new positioning statement so that a larger audience views you as their solution
*When you take a niche, you can stand out and gain the necessary visibility in order to own the larger market.
9. The Missing Social Sites
· A lot of people are having difficulty controlling their online brand presence. If you Google your name, are you happy with the results?
· There are a number of sites that you are on if you are reading this: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter.
· Here is a list of the other profiles that you should claim if you want more control over your online identity:
1. Spoke – a popular people search engine
2. Google profiles – the hub for your Google identity
3. Squidoo – a reference site created by Seth Godin
4. SlideShare – share your PowerPoint presentations
5. Delicious – the ultimate social bookmarking site
6. BackType – manage your blog comments
7. Fast Company – everyone have a profile on this top media site
8. VisualCV – take your resume to the next level with multimedia
· Make sure you use a full name when you register these accounts.
*The more social profiles you create, the more power you have over perception.
10. The Ultimate Branding System
· The system
1. Gather and monitor – learn as much as you can about your industry and what people are saying about you
2. Organise – take the best content and organize it using Delicious
3. Distribute – share this content throughout your social media profiles, use quotes in blog posts, books, and other material that you develop and publish.
· Site definition
· Google.com/reader – use this content management system to subscribe to blogs and news feeds.
· Google.com/alerts – subscribe to your name, company’s name and industry buzzwords through email or RSS (really simple syndication)
· TweetBeep.com – this site allows you to set up alerts for tweets
· Technorati.com – search for popular blogs and subscribe to them. You can also search for daily posts that talk about you or your industry
· BackType.com – Review blog comments that have mentioned you, your company or various terms
· BoardTracker.com – set an alert for when your brand is mentioned in discussion boards
· AllTop.com – find the top blogs in many different categories
*Save time by using a system that successful people are already using
Personal Branding Tips (Dan Schawbel’s Personal Branding VIP newsletter)
· Be specific. If you want to be known for everything, you will be known for nothing! By taking a niche, you can gain the necessary visibility in order to achieve success.
· Own it. Brand yourself before someone else does it for you! If you don’t start controlling your online perceptions, then you will be judges solely based on popular opinion.
· Be consistent. You should constantly get your face, name and expertise out there, so you become the top-of-mind brand in your field.
· Follow the marketplace. It's important to stay on top of market trends so you have an idea of where things are going in your world.
· Business cards still matter. If you're looking to network with decision makers, then you need a business card. Younger professionals might bump their iPhone into yours to exchange contact details, but hiring managers and executives are looking for paper. Your business card should position you as an expert in your field; have your picture, your website, etc.
· Diversify your income streams. The economy makes business unpredictable. The best way to confront anything you can't control is to diversify the way you conduct business. You can lose your job tomorrow, but if you create products, do consulting work, and other revenue generating activities, you will protect yourself.
Innovation Techniques for Your Personal Brand (Katie Konrath)
Like innovation, Personal Branding is hard and fresh ideas to stand out are always needed. So what happens when you feel stuck? Here are three time-tested innovation techniques to get you going again:
1. Copy Ideas. By this, I don’t mean to blatantly copy the branding (and blog posts) of people in your industry. Instead, see what people in other industries are doing effectively – and model your tactics on theirs. Instant ideas and you might even be a pioneer for doing them in your field!
2. PMI. Have something go wrong with your branding? It’s time for Plus, Minus, Interesting thinking. First, push yourself to think of at least 10 positive (Plus) results of your crisis. Then, jot down a couple negatives (Minus). Finally, think of at least 5 possible Interesting things that could happen as a result. The PMI will give you a different perspective on even the worst situations and help you figure out how to move forward.
3. Think Backwards. Your brain doesn’t like to think of new ideas. To trick yourself out of a rut, stop trying to figure out how to move forward! Instead imagine you’ve already achieved your goal. Then figure out how you got there. Who helped you? What knowledge helped you get there? What happened to help you on your way? Once you know how you got there, figure out how to make those things happen for you.
How to get traffic for your blog
You perhaps have already explored the blog of Seth Godin, but I absolutely love his list of guidelines for how to get traffic for your blog and would like to share it with you:
- Use lists.
- Be topical... write posts that need to be read right now.
- Learn enough to become the expert in your field.
- Break news.
- Be timeless... write posts that will be readable in a year.
- Be among the first with a great blog on your topic, then encourage others to blog on the same topic.
- Share your expertise generously so people recognize it and depend on you.
- Announce news.
- Write short, pithy posts.
- Encourage your readers to help you manipulate the technorati top blog list.
- Don't write about your cat, your boyfriend or your kids.
- Write long, definitive posts.
- Write about your kids.
- Be snarky. Write nearly libelous things about fellow bloggers, daring them to respond (with links back to you) on their blog.
- Be sycophantic. Share linklove and expect some back.
- Include polls, meters and other eye candy.
- Tag your posts. Use del.ico.us.
- Coin a term or two.
- Do email interviews with the well-known.
- Answer your email.
- Use photos. Salacious ones are best.
- Be anonymous.
- Encourage your readers to digg your posts. (and to use furl and reddit). Do it with every post.
- Post your photos on flickr.
- Encourage your readers to subscribe by RSS.
- Start at the beginning and take your readers through a months-long education.
- Include comments so your blog becomes a virtual water cooler that feeds itself.
- Assume that every day is the beginning, because you always have new readers.
- Highlight your best posts on your Squidoo lens.
- Point to useful but little-known resources.
- Write about stuff that appeals to the majority of current blog readers--like gadgets and web 2.0.
- Write about Google.
- Have relevant ads that are even better than your content.
- Don't include comments, people will cross post their responses.
- Write posts that each include dozens of trackbacks to dozens of blog posts so that people will notice you.
- Run no ads.
- Keep tweaking your template to make it include every conceivable bell or whistle.
- Write about blogging.
- Digest the good ideas of other people, all day, every day.
- Invent a whole new kind of art or interaction.
- Post on weekdays, because there are more readers.
- Write about a never-ending parade of different topics so you don't bore your readers.
- Post on weekends, because there are fewer new posts.
- Don't interrupt your writing with a lot of links.
- Dress your blog (fonts and design) as well as you would dress yourself for a meeting with a stranger.
- Edit yourself. Ruthlessly.
- Don't promote yourself and your business or your books or your projects at the expense of the reader's attention.
- Be patient.
- Give credit to those that inspired, it makes your writing more useful.
- Ping technorati. Or have someone smarter than me tell you how to do it automatically.
- Write about only one thing, in ever-deepening detail, so you become definitive.
- Write in English.
- Better, write in Chinese.
- Write about obscure stuff that appeals to an obsessed minority.
- Don't be boring.
- Write stuff that people want to read and share.
Five Personal Branding Basics in Social Media:
Posted October 19, 2010 by Mike Johansson
Link: http://marketingconversation.com/2011/01/20/personal-branding-in-social-media/
1. Have your avatar be the same across all presences: That little image of you needs to be instantly recognizable. We recognize a face before we recognize a name. And, even if you have a common name, your face is distinctive. Also, make sure your face is what dominates the space. Anything less makes it hard to recognize.
2. Have your name be your real name OR a consistent name with a consistent bio: Your name on your social media presences should be the same. This may not be practical if you have a very common name or a long or difficult-to-remember name. In that case come up with a memorable name for your account and be sure your real name is prominent. For example, I am mikefixs on Twitter, but my real name is right there at the top of the bio. In the bio say concisely who you are and say it consistently across platforms. This consistency will ultimately help with the search engine optimization (SEO) of your name.
3. Have all your social media presences linked (as much as is practicable): Reference all of your social media presences (as much as you can) from each of your social media pages. There is a whole blog post in how to do this for SEO value and that will come later. For now it’s enough to say that anyone finding you on one social media platform needs to know all of the other places they can connect with you.
4. Have a consistent stated reason for being in social media: It says a lot about some people who are on Linkedin to find their next job but on Facebook to recall all the partying. It may reflect your true nature, but it sends a mixed message. Decide why you really need to be in social media, spell it out in your bio spaces on each page and stick to it.
5. Have a clear vision for how you add value in social media: This is trickiest part if you’re relatively new to social media on many platforms. Do you know how you are adding value to others by being here? It may be to answer questions from others. It may be to share great stuff you find. It may be to help others connect. How you are perceived on the “giving” side of social media will have a huge impact on the likelihood you will be on the “receiving” end of good things in social media. What kind of good things? Introductions to new networks, tips on great jobs, leads on the latest information in your field … the list does go on. The important thing is that ultimately this may be the real reason to be in social media.
1. Have your avatar be the same across all presences: That little image of you needs to be instantly recognizable. We recognize a face before we recognize a name. And, even if you have a common name, your face is distinctive. Also, make sure your face is what dominates the space. Anything less makes it hard to recognize.
2. Have your name be your real name OR a consistent name with a consistent bio: Your name on your social media presences should be the same. This may not be practical if you have a very common name or a long or difficult-to-remember name. In that case come up with a memorable name for your account and be sure your real name is prominent. For example, I am mikefixs on Twitter, but my real name is right there at the top of the bio. In the bio say concisely who you are and say it consistently across platforms. This consistency will ultimately help with the search engine optimization (SEO) of your name.
3. Have all your social media presences linked (as much as is practicable): Reference all of your social media presences (as much as you can) from each of your social media pages. There is a whole blog post in how to do this for SEO value and that will come later. For now it’s enough to say that anyone finding you on one social media platform needs to know all of the other places they can connect with you.
4. Have a consistent stated reason for being in social media: It says a lot about some people who are on Linkedin to find their next job but on Facebook to recall all the partying. It may reflect your true nature, but it sends a mixed message. Decide why you really need to be in social media, spell it out in your bio spaces on each page and stick to it.
5. Have a clear vision for how you add value in social media: This is trickiest part if you’re relatively new to social media on many platforms. Do you know how you are adding value to others by being here? It may be to answer questions from others. It may be to share great stuff you find. It may be to help others connect. How you are perceived on the “giving” side of social media will have a huge impact on the likelihood you will be on the “receiving” end of good things in social media. What kind of good things? Introductions to new networks, tips on great jobs, leads on the latest information in your field … the list does go on. The important thing is that ultimately this may be the real reason to be in social media.
