Brand Yourself Online
There are a number of ways to brand yourself online. The following suggestions will help you to “start” to brand yourself online. Branding yourself is a process and not a single task but the following suggestions can help you to get started. It is important to do these things so that you can convey your very own message.
1. Set up a blog – Preferably WordPress. Hands down, WordPress is the best blog format to use. I personally like Thesis Theme for Word Press. It allows for ease of personalization that some of the others don’t but any theme will do.
Use your own name for the blog address i.e. darwinfarr.com.
2. You will need to host your blog with a website hosting account. Go-daddy is a good one to use and they are very helpful in getting you set up. They will even load your WordPress blog onto your server. They will provide an email account with that hosting account and you can set up a personal email account which makes you look more professional. Go-daddy is good about helping in all aspects of setting your account up.
3. Set up your profile in a number of directories like Zoominfo, Ziggs, and others. Google is another good one to place you profile in. Be sure to point to your blog in your profile. Whenever a URL is asked for, put your blog address in. Google will start to see that link to your blog in a number of places and start ranking you higher and higher on their search engine.
3. To brand yourself online, you will have to place content or information on your website. You will need to know ahead of time what information will be placed on the website. A business plan is good to have in place first. If you are an affiliate of another company, you can write about that. If you have your own product then certainly write about that. Be honest in all that you do. You will loose the trust of anyone who sees your website if you are not truthful.
4. Once all these previously mentioned items are set up, then it is time to start marketing. I will mention two ways to market that have helped me tremendously.
a. Twitter – Set up a twitter account and start to tweet. You will find out quickly how to do that. The important thing to do is to develop a relationship with people on Twitter. Don’t just send them information about your product or opportunity. They will think you are spamming them and really you would be. Develop a relationship with individuals that have similar interests that you do and eventually they will come to your site and see what you are all about. If they are interested in what you have to offer, they will come to you. Would it be nice to have them come to you instead of the other way around?
b. Start writing articles. Go to places like EzineArticles and GoArticles or ArticleBase, which are some of the best, and start writing things about your service or product. I would recommend that you write an article a day for the first 90 days. That sounds like it is hard but you can do it. You will just have to focus and do some research and you can do it. It is OK not to write on weekends. Take some time off on weekends.
This information is not a complete list of things that can be done to brand yourself, but if you will start with these steps, you will be ahead of most when it comes to branding yourself on the internet.
