personal brand

You can make this as easy or as complicated as you like. I prefer the easy way so let me explain first of all why this is important and how it ties in with your online marketing.

Why Your Personal Brand is Important

If you think about the popular brands online, or even offline, what is it that makes them stand out above their competitors? They are easily recognisable.

As far as a personal brand goes, take Kylie Minogue for example. Kylie has been around since the 80s when Neighbours took off as a prime time TV series here in Australia. Since then, she has established herself in the UK with her singing career. Kylie Minogue is now recognised around the world and her success began from a humble role in Neighbours.

Kylie Minogue has beaten sports stars, media moguls and even the prime minister in a survey of Australia’s most powerful personal brands. (source: News.com.au)

Kylie Minogue Mosaic

7 Steps to Developing Your Personal Brand

Developing your Personal Brand is considered to be essential rather than a luxury. Every item you post anywhere online is there forever and for anyone to access.

You must consider what you would like to be known for and how you are perceived by others online is whether your brand will be noticed and warrant a following.

Note that Google keeps a record of every little tidbit in the search engines so if you were to apply for work and a potential employer were to do a search on your name, would you be happy with every single post and comment you ever made online?

Consider these steps when developing your own unique brand:

1. What are you passionate about? Choose a niche you can write and talk about easily where you can share your expertise online and when speaking to groups.
2. Write articles on your chosen niche. Become known as an authority in that niche by writing articles and submitting them to article directories.
3. Set up a personal or business website. This is where you can add more value for your potential clients and provide additional details of your services.
4. Set up a blog. Writing a blog and producing fresh content will keep your clients coming back to you as well as adding value to your website by linking to your services. This also enables you to begin building links and strengthen your websites authority in the search engines.
5. Social Media Profiling. With the rise of Social Media, you cannot escape the fact that you will in fact have to set up profiles with at least Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Google.
6. Design a unique business card. Carry your business cards wherever you go as you never know who you may meet and network with.
7. Testimonials. Gather endorsements and quotes from notable people, admirers, fans or ideally happy clients.

Following these steps will start you on your way to developing your personal brand. I welcome all comments and your ideas on how you are progressing with these steps and in my next post, will elaborate on some strategies you can use to make this process work.

Ange Recchia
Hampton Internet Consulting 

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Social Media is a tool for building strategies. With the popularity of Social Networking sites growing day by day, it is no wonder that businesses want to get onto the scene and increase their visibility. Dealing with potential consumers online is still a daunting task and fear still lurks.

How often do you hear your clients say they want to communicate with the public but don’t want to make the time to be involved on a day to day basis? They want to increase traffic and sales using the Social Media platform but no idea what it takes to do so.

Social Bookmarking

One of the first strategies to suggest is to use Social Bookmarking sites. Social Bookmarking is a way to get your sites in front of actual prospects for your product without depending on the search engines for traffic. Now without debating the subject, there are thousands of people using sites like Delicious, Google, Yahoo, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Propeller, Blinklist, Diigo and the list goes on and on.

Direct referrals coming from various Social Bookmarking services, and in particular, services which focus around your niche, would increase the opportunity of making a sale. This is only one aspect to consider when devising a promotional strategy.

As good as it is to be found in the SERPs of Google, Yahoo and MSN, businesses also need to be included in other properties. Focusing on the more popular Social Bookmarking sites to begin with and then adding more niche social sites as you progress will get you noticed.

Micro-Blogging

Some of you will argue that Micro-Blogging is a waste of time. Making small talk does nothing for productivity. I beg to differ. Having spent the last couple of years using Twitter, for example, has enabled me personally to make connections I would not have otherwise been able to.

There are many high profile users and brands all using this network and in so doing, have extended their reach to the general public. Some, like @Zappos have even been featured in the suggested users list which has increased their followers list by 200,000!

Contact Information

Note: @Zappos contact information in the left sidebar of their Twitter background. They make it easy for their customers to find and contact them which is one of the most important aspects for business today.

When using such a popular network to improve brand awareness and sales, this goes without saying. It is a clever strategy to be accessible in as many places as possible.

Social Networks

The Social Networking scene is ever evolving too. Once upon a time, MySpace was the biggest and the best. Now Facebook has taken over MySpace and leads the race.

Create a presence that looks and behaves like user profiles to connect and engage with your customers and amplify your voice to their friends.

The benefits of Facebook are not only the fact that you can keep your personal profile free from business connections, thus allowing you to keep up with your family and friends privately, the new business pages are a must for anyone with a need to keep up with their customers. The other benefits of creating a business page is so the content from your blog and or twitter stream can be automatically added to fill the content so your fans can easily keep up with your efforts and campaigns.

Keeping up-to-date with this information on how to use and streamline your Social Media profiles is imperative for knowing what to do next in your online strategies. How do you manage to keep up with changes and managing your profiles and business? All comments are welcome.

Ange Recchia
Hampton Internet Consulting 

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Hampton Internet Consulting was born out of confusion, frustration and many queries I receive from people everyday who are starting a new Internet Business.

Being involved in forums and even day to day Social Networking in general, I often see many people struggling with where to begin!

The main concerns I hear are things such as setting up Social Media profiles, which blogging platform to use and registering a domain in order to upload a WordPress blog.

Other queries involve how to handle their email subscriptions or creating email accounts in Outlook. Which browser is best and what about anti-virus software?

All these questions will be answered and I will even provide services both online and offline to help you outsource all those little (or big) things which you do not want to deal with at the beginning of your new venture.

There’s so much to do and research let alone learning to write your own quality content to fill your site with information which will attract visitors searching for what you have to offer.

The Amazing Internet

This video (above) is typical of how people interact and become curious of the Internet and how it works. Okay, its a bad late 80′s early 90′s CBC video however I think you get the gist of how online communication began.

Message Board

In the beginning, the Internet was typically a message board. As more and more users went online and technology advanced, it became possible to chat with other users.

Shortly after, people became even savvier with this global medium wanting to do more online like building websites purely for information and then for business.

Once websites began to appear online, the next question was how do we get traffic?

How to Build Traffic to Your Site

One of the issues which most new webmasters are always concerned with is how to build traffic and have regular visitors to my site.

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising was one of the first forms of attracting visitors in order to make sales from your site. While PPC is still popular, there is an even more popular player in the game today which brings us to Social Media Marketing.

Social Media Marketing

You may have heard of Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and the like but did you know that there are over 2000 Social Media sites!

Social Media Marketing has become one of the most popular, frustrating and enjoyable (all at the same time) ways, for building traffic. Best of all, it’s free traffic. The popularity of Social Networking has lead to more and more information being shared online which raises more questions of security than ever.

In the following posts I will elaborate on all these questions in regards to having a presence online and Internet Marketing so I look forward to your company and contributions via comments to develop the conversation even further.

Ange Recchia
Hampton Internet Consulting 