Let's jump right in and get you
started on building your online presence. We're not going to dive down the
rabbit hole too deep in this post, but we are going to explore the edge of the wonderland
of online personal branding. We'll peer
through the looking glass at ourselves and determine what strategic moves to
take to differentiate and positively
promote ourselves, along with the help of the Caterpillar and the Cheshire Cat. Next,
we'll follow the white rabbit as a guide through online sites to join to build your online presence and how to advance through the curiouser and curiouser wonderland of personal branding. Last,
we'll talk to that shiny white rabbit and the crazy mad hatter on specific techniques
of organic SEO, to build memorable and lasting results.
Building your personal online brand
will help you to gain credibility and organic SEO:
- Define who you are and your personal brand
- Begin to build your online credibility
- What sites to join to start some organic SEO
Are
you ready to get started?
Alice starts her zany adventure by
following the white blur of rushing rabbit who is muttering, Oh dear! Oh dear!
I shall be too late! Many people make
the mistake of feeling they are either too late to start their personal
branding (so why bother?) or should wait to start building their online brand
until they are perfect and have it all together (I'm not ready yet). Others
feel that perhaps waiting until the perfect moment when they have a lot of extra
time lying around (I can't do it all today, so I'll wait till tomorrow to start).
Let's bust right through those
misconceptions like the Kool Aid man. Oh yeah. It's better to jump in to
branding yourself online and get started now, while making adjustments and
improvements along the way. Take action. Build upon what you've got. Yes, this
will take some time, but you don't have to do it all at once. Do what you can, take
a break, and come back to do more. Just get started. Once you've started, just
keep at it when you can.
The Great Question: Who are you?
The Who have a song about it. Inigo
Montoya asks the Man in Black. The Caterpillar asks Alice.
Caterpillar: Who are YOU?
Alice: This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. I -- I
hardly know, sir, just at present -- at least I know who I was when I got up
this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.
You've heard it before. You are your
own brand.
To be a good brand steward of your name and reputation, first before you get online you should get
out some paper, a pen, and a magnifying glass for this section. You'll be using
the magnifying glass to critically examine your own strengths, weaknesses, and to
get some quality time gazing at your navel. You'll be brainstorming and writing
down some answers that will help you to identify your unique brand. These will
change over time, just as you do, so don't worry about being perfect in your
answers with the idea you'll be held to them forever. Get it down on paper
where you are now as a written snapshot. Don't try to be perfect, just be real.
Feel free to doodle, if it helps!
1. Who are you?
Identify:
- Why are you doing this in the first place? Set your criteria for determining success, otherwise how
do you know when you've reached your goal? Be honest, accurate, crisp. Keep the
end in mind. Reverse engineer the steps in your head as you visual your
destination.
- What are your motives for building
an online presence? Identify your drive and be aware that these days, people
will see through you eventually. Transparency, authenticity and honesty are key
criteria for long-term success online.
- What are your strengths? weaknesses?
Be self aware, critical and open. No one is flawless. This is not a list of
your skills, but personal attributes. Think professionally and personally.
Also, think of your own personality traits, as well. Some people have found
personality tests to be helpful in this part. If you think this might be
helpful for you, visit Meyers Briggs, Keirsey, and the Holland Code tests.
- What are your technical skills? credentials?
Write them down.
- What are your soft skills? List them
out. MindTools has some
great resources for this.
- What is your specialization? It's
great to be a jack of all trades, but what makes you stand out? What's your
competitive advantage?
- What are your experiences? What key
things shaped you into who you are today?
- Now that you have written down your experiences, what is your story? What do you have
to say that makes you different?
- What is your personal mission
statement?
- Who is your target audience online?
- What impact do you want to have?
- How much time will you devote to
building and then maintaining your online presence? Setting a commitment and a
boundary are both important. Many advocates suggest 30 minutes 5 days a week,
but do what works for you. Write down ideas on what you think you can commit to
and then set that as a boundary to not overdo.
- What is your name? Branding yourself
online might be harder if your name is common.
If your name is Joe Schmoe, there might be 30 others with the same name.
Think then about using your middle name for all of your profiles, or a middle
initial. Spend some time online searching to see who is out there and how you
can differentiate your name. Once you know what you'll use, write it down. This
will be used not only in your online profiles, but also in titling and saving
your photograph profile images.
- Brainstorm key words that you want
to use to describe yourself, what you do, where you are, and what identifies
most with your target audience. Most importantly, as this is about you, use
what resonates most with your own head and heart. Circle your keywords and use
them when you begin to craft your message.
Books That Will Help You Answer "Who Are You?"
There are a lot of really great
books that touch on these questions above and more. Here are 7 books (my hunky husband lent me his head for the picture above) that have been
helpful for me:
- 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: A classic that teaches you the time matrix of urgent and important (Harvard has articles on this idea, as well), writing your mission statement, setting and implementing goals, and how to find balance.
- Getting Unstuck: Written by Harvard Business School's director of Career Development, this book walks you through a new career or a life-changing event. This is more of a specialty book that delves really deep, and one I would suggest you would focus on last, unless you are "stuck" in life right now.
- Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths for
Winning at Business Without Losing Your Self: One of my very favorite books that I highly recommend to everyone I encounter, this book has countless bits of wisdom that are easy digested and implemented from sports coaches to heads of state. Whatever industry you go into, this book is about ideas. From teaching you how to tell stories to why to take "no" as a question, this treasure trove of ideas from the greatest minds gathered by the co-founder of Fast Company is a keeper. I also highly recommend if you speak publicly; this book has a lot of great parables and stories to lead into key points.
- You, Inc.: The Art of Selling Yourself: From branding yourself to pitches and communicating your vision, this book by the Beckwiths who specialize in marketing is inspirational and really easy to read. It is worth checking out.
- Doing Work You Love: Discovering Your Purpose and Realizing Your Dreams: This book above is helpful with determining what career is a perfect fit for yourself and how to truly love what it is that you do. It asks many of the questions you answered above, and more (in a much better way than I do) that allow you to examine who you really are. From brainstorming ideas to teaching you how to identify psychological beliefs that may be holding you back, Cheryl Gilman motivates and inspires.
- Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life: Written by a management professor at The Wharton School, this book teaches you how to optimize your home life and work life. By learning how to improve performance in all four domains of life- work, home, community, and self- you can combine your multiple responsibilities and roles into the best way that fits your unique life. With a lot of quizzes, writing time, and self-examination of your life, this Wharton book is an intensive course printed and folded into a book spine.
Write Your Profile
Once you've written down all of your
information from the questions above and stared so hard at your navel that your eyes have permanently crossed,
start to whittle your personal goals, experiences, and differentiation down to simple sentences to strategically use in all of your
biographies and about pages. Think clarity and brevity.
Next, make a document on your computer and type it out. Whittle it down some more. This bit about you needs to be about four to six sentences, like an online Summary of Qualifications. Review it for
any spelling or grammatical errors, then review it again (two times never hurt) and save it.
If it helps, let me provide an example. You can see my personal summary here. To break my own summary of yourself/biography/about me down, I've got industry keywords in my first sentence along with a strong lead-in about my character that people know about me. Next, it's a "star statement". What is something special about yourself that you can talk about? Are there any specialties or things that differentiate you? The next sentence is a "personal statement" about my experiences. The final sentence then seeks to follow Tom Peters' advice of capturing the world's imagination. Everyone's will be different. What works for you?
Be aware when crafting your message to use keywords that your target
audience would be looking for and implement your own stories and experiences.
Be unique. This sounds hokey, but its true- only you can be you and that is powerful. Include personal details. People remember stories. Be memorable. Now that you've completed your written profile, you can use it to simply cut and paste it into the links coming up in the next section. Next, you'll need a visual representation of yourself to share with the world.
2. What do you look like?
This may sound like a funny
question, but knowing how you want to appear online is important. You will want
one photo to use as your profile image for all of your online professional profiles
and social media. Just like you have one logo for a company, the same goes for
you. Consistency and continuity in your online brand is key with what you identified in the
questions above. How do you want to represent yourself to the world?
The Duchess to Alice:
I quite agree with you. And the moral of that is: Be what you would seem to be,
or if you'd like it put more simply: Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise
than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was
not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be
otherwise.
Answer these questions for your personal
branding photograph:
- What traits do you want to
emphasize?
- Who's your target audience?
- How do you want to be perceived? Be
aware of your visual cues. Often, people think with their eyes and hear what
they see.
- What will you wear? A suit? A
t-shirt? What colors will you use to communicate?
- Where will you be? In front of a
computer? Outside?
- When taking cropping your image, how
will you compose it? Will you use the rule of thirds, the golden section or
diagonal rule perhaps? Think about it and then do it.
Grinning Like a Cheshire Cat
Many people I know utilize two
pictures, dependent upon their target audience. You might use a really
professional shot of yourself on LinkedIn, for example, and a more fun, laid
back image that shows more personality for Twitter or Facebook. Just don't be
grinning all crazy like the Cheshire Cat, unless you want people to think
you're on catnip.
After you have the image(s) you want, now's the time to edit
them:
- Clean up any glaring problems with
your photograph, if you want, but be real. Don't over whiten your teeth so
bright they cause glare on the computer screen, don't squeeze your image
together to look thinner, don't cut yourself out and put yourself on a
different background. Be authentic.
- Create at least 3 different square
sizes of your image. For example, I have one that is 93x93, 155x155, 354x354,
and 510x510, in addition to my original
sized image. If you are not comfortable re-sizing your image, a cool online
option is to use MyPictr to do it for you.
- Title your images with your name.
When you save your image, put your name first. This helps the search engine
spiders know what content your image contains. When someone does an image search,
then your image will appear with how you titled it. An example would be: "alana_renfro_93x93" showing the full name and the size of the image for your files for easy accessibility.
Blogs that elaborate on branding yourself:
1.
Rockable Rockstar Personal Branding: a .pdf you can get for free with extremely valuable information on branding yourself.
2. The Art of Branding Yourself and Your Freelancing Business: This link has some really nice examples, samples and details. If you learn by seeing visuals, be sure to check this one out.
3.
Tom Peters' The Brand Called You (A
classic): This basically launched the whole personal branding idea into the mainstream consciousness. A great 1997 article worth a read, much of it is still applicable today.
This post is to get you started
online with building your personal brand and presence. Other key components that are mutually reinforcing are networking,
delivering on-time and within scope, going above and beyond, building your
reputation, body language, following-up, exceptional customer service and having an elevator pitch. To get you started on thinking about your own elevator pitch, here's a great set of articles by Harvard Business on developing
your own elevator pitch:
3 Ways to Pitch Yourself in 30 Seconds
How to Develop Your Leadership Pitch
How to Perfect an Elevator Pitch About Yourself
How to Write An Elevator Pitch
Build Your Online Presence
Now that you have your name determined, discovered your personal brand,
have working knowledge of your differentiation point, taken and saved your specific image and image sizes, written your biography/about me, and a list of your key words, we can jump right
in and get started on site building. But where to start? In this curiouser and curiouser
wonderland of personal branding, there are a few key free sites to diligently work
your way through that will pay off.
The best way to get through this section?
The King of Hearts says it best to the White Rabbit "Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end:
then stop."
LinkedIn is the first site I
recommend professionals and students to join. Other than Behance, LinkedIn has
provided more jobs and opportunities than I had ever imagined. More than just a
place to build business connections and network (which is invaluable in itself)
it allows you to have your connections write recommendations/endorsements about
you. If you are looking to build trust, credibility and a strong online
presence, this is your first stop.
Keep in-mind when starting this
profile: First, you don't have to do it all immediately, get started by cutting
and pasting your written section about you. Second, upload your professional
picture. Third, look to connect with a couple of groups in your industry and
some of your already established professional contacts. Once you've filled out
as much of your profile as you'd like (look at the profiles of those who are
your competition, as well as those you would like to emulate or hold a position
you aspire to) contact your established professional network and ask for a
recommendation/endorsement. Instead of going into too much detail in this post,
here are two links to get you started on making the most of LinkedIn:
LinkedIn on YouTube: Watch videos on what LinkedIn is,
how it works, and testimonials on this YouTube channel. Also, if you do a
little clicking around, you'll find some additional videos on LinkedIn that are
amusing. Be aware: some of the videos are a bit dated and there are a lot of
new tools that LinkedIn has as of 2010 that may not be mentioned on the videos.
LinkedIn on Fortune Magazine: This great March 25, 2010 article by
Jessi Hempel shares LinkedIn's new capabilities as of this month, but it also
shows you how to make the most of your LinkedIn profile.
This is an easy way to build your
online personal brand, and if your name is common (like our Joe Schmoe that we
talked about earlier) this will help differentiate you. Once you go to the link
above, you may find there is already a profile for you, or someone has your
name. If there is already a profile for you, great! Log-in and start
customizing it.
If someone has your name, don't despair. Once we're done
building all of our profiles and personalized URLs, you'll log back in here and
add some of them. Along with your cut and paste biography and some Google Notes
about yourself, you'll be on your way to having your common name rank in search
results and building your online personal brand and presence. Again, there are
many things we could cover in just this one section, but here are two links on
Google Profiles that say it better:
Create the Perfect Google Profile in
7 Steps: A helpful article by Ryan Rancatore
on how to build your Google Profile and why linking is so important.
Google Profile by Google: This bullet list of steps to take from Google Support is simple.
Plaxo is a"smart, socially
connected address book" that keeps you up-to-date with a stream of what
all of your contacts are doing from Twitter, RSS, and other feeds they choose
to include. Like LinkedIn, this site is a professional networking site. The
dual purpose of Plaxo, which comes into play for this post, is that it helps
with your personal branding and SEO. Like all of the sites above, it is a free
way to build your organic SEO and to control your name online, providing a powerful
personal brand online.
As you build out this profile, go
ahead and include the link from LinkedIn, if you'd like. Once we've walked
through each of these sites, I'll have a check list to go back into each of your
profiles and add your personal URLs. Right now, just focus on building out each
of these profiles and noting your URL for the upcoming checklist.
Plaxo in the News: Here you will
find articles that PC Magazine, The New York Times, and Wired Magazine have
written about Plaxo.
Naymz is a great site for your
personal branding SEO, but I don't recommend it to everyone. Here are the
positives: It lists highly in searches and allows your connections to write
little recommendations for you. It also has a fun little feature that sends you
an email anytime anyone visits your profile, and where they are from. When you
have accumulated a reputation scoring system rank of "10", you can
also see the actual IP address of the visitor. It, of course, has a microblogging feature and allows you to list all of your links for personal link building that improves your online personal branding SEO.
Here's the negatives and why I would
suggest possibly not joining: It sends too much spam in the beginning. Also, it
basically serves the same purpose as LinkedIn, but it is not as well developed in the bells and whistles, less frequented, and does not have nearly a high reputation as LinkedIn. If you are the only person with your name, I'd go ahead and
suggest you go ahead and skip it. If you do have someone else who has the same name as you
do, this is worth checking out to see if its worth building a profile.
Ziggs is marketed towards business
professionals. It is helpful for building your personal SEO and showing you
when someone Googles you where they are from. Your biography, as in the links
above, will help you name to be associated to the keywords that you have
included. Again, I suggest this site if you are competing to have your name
rank over someone else's. Otherwise, it might not be worth your time. Visit the
site and decide for yourself.
You may be laughing at me right now
for even posting the siteTwitter. When I tell people this is my favorite site
and that it can be great for building your online personal brand, they look at
me like I spent too much time at the Mad Hatter's Tea Party. They think, what
could telling someone where I'm at or what I'm eating do for my personal brand?
Seriously though, stick with me, if you take nothing more away from this post,
take this:
Twitter is fantastic for building
your online credibility and reputation. This is a link you will be sending your
clients or potential employers to. Why? It is because you will offer strategic value
on your Twitter profile to your target audience and link to sites and articles
that show how knowledgeable you are in your industry. It also is fantastic for real-time searches. If you are in the graphic
design industry, find your niche interest in graphic design and post the links that
you find interesting (I use bit.ly). Be sure to use the key words you
identified from your exercise above and your biography/about me in your tweets
with a hashtag.
The same goes for the advertising
industry. There are countless designers, creative directors, CEOs and agencies
on Twitter. Also, engage your followers and partake in related conversations;
don't just be a spectator. Twitter is a fantastic networking tool. Last, be real, authentic, transparent, listen and participate (as often as you can) on Twitter.
I could go on singing the praises of
Twitter forever, along with sharing the many stories of the incredible professional
connections I've made through it, but we'd be wasting a lot of your valuable
time. (I love you for reading this, so I wouldn't do that to you.) Here are a
few links though that will help you on your strategy when using Twitter for
your personal brand, as well as some great How To's:
The Twitter Guide Book: Mashable has
a rad resource of everything you could ever want to know about Twitter, from 101
How To's to building your Twitter community and managing your Twitter stream.
If you only check out one of these sites, this is your number one choice.
30 Minute Brand Builder for Twitter:
Monica O'Brien shares how to spend just 30 minutes on Twitter as an effective
branding tool and what it means when we say "engage" people.
How To Build Your Personal Brand on Twitter: Dan Schawbel offers valuable advice in 6 steps on how to brand yourself,
like branding your Twitter handle and establish a marketing plan.
Also, just so you have the knowledge
of the resource available to you, I've composed three lists that you might find
useful. The first (pictured above) is a list of over 300 advertising and
graphic design agencies on Twitter with high repute, as well as award-winning designers,
art directors and CEOs of the agencies.
The second list is comprised of over
55 San Diego creative industry contacts that are on Twitter. From agencies to
social media and designers, this list will help to get you connected with
talented people locally. The third list is all of the Print Magazine Design
Annual 2009 winners who are on Twitter. I hope these can help you to get
started with making some great contacts and industry relationships!
If you are in the creative industry,
like graphic design, advertising, web design or interactive, I will be posting
on 12 portfolio sites that you can join to build your online personal branding
this week. Check back soon for this information.
*whew* Are you still with me? If so,
you deserve a really big pat on the back.
Take a minute to get all of your
links together from each of the online profiles you have made with your
biography/about me, key words, and profile images. Now log into each of the sites
above and link them to one another. For example, on your Google Profile, you
should have your LinkedIn and Twitter sites, along with whatever other profile
site URLs that you want to add.
The more personal sites that link to one another,
the better your personal online branding will be (with balance, of course). Don't
put a ton of links that are the same, or links to sites not about yourself, or
try to trick the system. We'll cover that next. Again, key thoughts in link
building are to be helpful for your target audience- only include the links
about yourself that you feel best represent yourself authentically and will
build credibility and a strong reputation.
Organic SEO: White Rabbit vs. Mad Hatter
There are two kinds of organic SEO.
The first is white hat techniques (which we'll attribute to the White Rabbit)
and the second is black hat techniques (which the Mad Hatter will lay claim
to). You want to walk on the long-term
results, reliable, and strong character path of white hat SEO techniques, for
if you stray off onto the dark side of the Mad Hatter, Google will kick you off
their site indexes and it'll be, well, as the Queen says ...off with your head.
For your sites and personal brand, at least. This is not something you want to mess around with.
One example of black hat methods that
you have probably seen are those sites that have text hidden in their
"white space" by having a bunch of white text. Basically, black hat
techniques are those that seek to slide something by, or better the site
rankings in a non-ethical manner.
Don't be like the Mad Hatter and go for the
short-term reward of immediate rankings only to be black listed by the search
engines. Instead, focus on your online personal brand offering quality keywords
about your industry and yourself, along with content that engages your target
audience.
White hat methods are those that will
really pay off long-term, such as link building and using specific key words
naturally that are part of your personal brand. Also, having the same name for all personal URLs (mine is "alanarenfro") will help, as will having the same bio/about me
that you wrote at the beginning of this post. Having a blog helps, but that takes a little more time but has phenomenal return on the investment of your time. I'll be writing a post on that in the next 2 weeks, with a lot of visuals to get you started, along with content suggestions, if you are interested in starting your own blog.
Most of all, it's all about being real, authentic and transparent. Those traits will help you to ride off into the sunset... perhaps not with a white fuzzy bunny with a shiny pocket watch, but instead with a long-standing reputation. These are the SEO techniques for building an online presence through free sites that will help you
establish credibility and build a strong online personal brand.
Twitter is a free social messaging
(micro blogging) utility for staying connected in real-time."
