A Little Bit Of Personal Branding

As most, if not all, marketers will tell you: You NEED to build your brand. If you have a product or service that you want successfully acknowledged, your branding system is the fastest way in which people will be associating you and your product or service with your reputation – meaning the level of trust, confidence, and satisfaction they can expect from you. Every niche site that I have built in the past – the shirt companies that I managed, the ezine that I currently run and the future one I plan to start – have all originated from my desire to establish trusted brands with my niche audiences.

While I have no plans on becoming a “problogger”, the view of branding ones self stems from the necessity to market an ideal version of yourself to your audience. In this line of thinking, your readers and peers need to know and trust YOU as a person in order for you to progress at all. To further expand on this, I am also of the belief that the concept behind marketing yourself stands true for every field and it is one that is often overlooked: Anytime you need to interact with others in a business situation you need to be marketing yourself. With this in mind, I’ve decided that it is a good idea to incorporate a little bit of personal branding into both this blog and a few other areas online.

I decided over the weekend to make a few changes on my blog to bring about this idea of personal branding. What started as a simple task quickly showed exactly how much work personal branding actually involves. I decided to just start with a couple of visual things on the blog itself. On the top of my sidebar, I have added both a picture of me and a mini-biography that links to my “About” page. On the actual “About” page itself, I have added the same picture and a larger biography. This might seem repetitive, but that is precisely the point: Personal branding cannot stop at just your own blog or website, as it and everything else that you do online have to have a continuity. Twitter, forums, comments, social networking sites – everything has to be inline with one another if you are going try to build a brand. Everywhere that someone can see what you are trying to brand has to reflect the consistent idealized view you are marketing.

So if you are looking to build your own brand, here are a few specific posts that you SHOULD check out. I think the best bit of advice for any newer blogger or creators of a company out there is to focus on this idealized, visual representation – the brand – that you are working to develop as it fits into everything involved in selling your product, service, or self.
References
- Branding 101: How to Promote Your Blog Like the Big Guys Do by: Leo Babauta
- How To Brand Your Blog by: John Chow
- The Importance of Branding And Why You Might Be Screwing It Up Badly by: David Risley
- 3 Powerful Tools For Monitoring Your Brand by: David Risley
- Want a Popular Blog? Put Your Ego Aside by: Daniel Scocco
- A Blogger’s Guide to Branding with Social Media by: Steven Snell

Tagged as: Branding