When it comes to starting a business online, most people seem to miss one of the most important elements, which is branding yourself. It is a good thing to try to create a brand for your particular company or website, but it is critical to establish a brand for yourself more than anything. A great example is Steve Jobs. He is the current CEO and innovator for Apple. The brand that he has built for himself and his life story has helped Apple achieve some of the things that it has achieved today. With his powerful speeches at the Apple expo to his front-page headlines about his battle with cancer, he has distinguished himself as a true icon and a person that is highly respected in the industry.
Everyone needs to start to realize that the Internet should be no different. It is more important now than ever to start branding yourself as the expert or coach because the economy is starting to shift dramatically and you need to make that same shift as well by creating a brand for yourself. Just use the FTC’s new online laws that they recently enforced as your personal warning. I have come up with 8 different ways on how you can brand yourself online.
1 – Building a Tribe
Most bloggers or marketers that I talk to are unfamiliar with the strategy of building a tribe. Seth Godin defines a tribe as a group who are connected to one another, a leader, and an idea. These are quite easy to build, you just need to go out and find like-minded people that are interested in sharing their ideas and promoting each other. This is absolutely phenomenal concept that should be implanting in your personal brand development strategy.
2 – Creating a Personal Blog
I would say this is the second most important thing that you need online besides a newsletter. You need to start blogging about yourself, your experiences, and the one thing that you are most knowledgeable that you feel other people will benefit from the most. You need to create the mindset that you are the expert and the coach that will lead your team to victory by providing them the knowledge and wisdom to empower themselves to success.
3 – Networking on the Social Networks
Most people that doing any kind of marketing online, fail to understand how to leverage the social networking in the right way. You should never try to promote any product or company to anyone until you build and establish a relationship with them first. This is where 99% of the people online fail. They fail to add value to the relationship and fail to help out others achieve their goals before helping out themselves. I call this relationship marketing because it is all about branding yourself through these relationships and get other people to brand you by recommending you to others.
4 – Blog Commenting
When I first started blogging, I didn’t realize the importance on commenting on other blogs in my industry. I just did it as a means to get backlinks to my site as well get on the top of everyone top commentators plugin. I quickly realized the true benefits of doing commenting because it not only sent new visitors to my website, but it also allowed me to develop many relationships and brand myself as an authority within the industry. If you currently have a new blog or website, I would definitely recommend that you take a little bit of time to do some commenting on other blogs within your industry.
5 – Forum Posting
This is also another strategy that I didn’t realize the importance of. By just adding value and answering questions in the forums, you can quickly gain a following in the forums and additional traffic to your website by putting a link in your signature field. If you are an Internet marketer or blogger and you aren’t an active participate in the Warrior Forum, then you need to head over there immediately and start adding value to the forum.
6 – Writing Quality Content
When writing content on a blog or starting a new blog, this should be your #1 reason for doing it. You need to add value and do it with the intention of helping or educating others. The reason why blogs were design is to tell your personal story and write about your life experiences. I see to often that many bloggers just blog to promote products and sell others on the services that they provide. This is definitely not the way to do it and it saddens me every time I see a blog that is full of commercials. This needs to stop and bloggers need to start providing quality content for their visitors.
7 – Article Marketing
If there is any form of online marketing that you should be doing, it definitely should be article marketing. It has stood the test of time and is proven to be one of the most effective forms of marketing online. It helps you both to build a personal brand for yourself, as well as one for your company. What most people don’t understand about article marketing is once you create a unique article and submit it to the article directories, it stays there forever and has the ability to be seen and placed on thousands of other websites. It is one of the most effective forms of viral marketing.
8 – Guest Posting
Just by you reading this post, you can already see the benefits of doing guest posting. It can quickly help you gain notoriety within your industry as well as help you create and identify a brand for yourself. Make sure when you are doing guest post to add value and relate to that particular audience that you are in fact writing to. Guest posting will jump-start your blogging career and help you capture a new audience for your blog.
I hoped that everyone gained value from this post and I would like to thank John Chow for letting me share my knowledge about branding yourself online.
Donny Gamble writes a blog about creating wealth by combining Internet Marketing with Network Marketing and explains why every Internet marketer should have an MLM business.