The Importance of Personal Branding Online #MeIsAboutYou #Spon
You are right. Staying out there is difficult for some. They think you can just do branding once and never…
This is a Domain.ME sponsored post.
Building a personal brand online takes time and some planning. To stand out, you’ll need to express yourself online through your personal brand. Choose a business name that clearly states who you are or what you want to be known for. Your brand should be a unique URL so people can easily find you online.
I’ll share some of my personal branding tips by sharing some of the steps I’ve taken to build my personal brand online.
Building Scraps of My Geek Life & ScrappinMichele Brands
Over 18 years ago, I quit working and my son was born. I knew that I wanted to create a place for myself online, but I wasn’t sure what that would be. Here are some of the steps I took along the way to establish myself as an online brand.
- I began with my local mom group and volunteered to work with the online services at the national and local level. This gave me experience with a large organization and put my name and face out there as the online services expert.
- Created a website with a unique URL for my family to share photos of my kids. This was to give myself practice working with websites (and eventually blogs.)
- Started a scrapbooking business online to give myself experience with online sales and creating web stores.
- Created a blog, Scraps of My Geek Life in 2007 to share my love of scrapbooking and technology. It took me a long time to come up with the name, but I felt it captured my love of scrapping my geek life and the domain name, ScrapsofMyGeekLife.com was available.
- Established ScrappinMichele as my name on all forums and social media sites, so that I would easily be recognized no matter where I was.
- Joined social network sites early on to establish my brand on that site and to learn more about the different social media networks.
- Register .Me unique URLs, ScrappinMichele.Me and ScrapsOfMyGeekLife.Me to further set up those names as my brands.
When I created my personal brand, I wanted to somehow encompass that I was a geek at heart and include my passion for scrapbooking. Over time, my brand has evolved to more tech and less scrapbooking, however, I chose not to change my name. It gives me the option to pull the scrapbooking back into my brand if I should decide to make that change.
Becoming Your Personal Brand
When I am at an event and introduce myself as Michele McGraw, I often get a blank stare, then I say, ScrappinMichele, and I get hugs. My brand name is recognized more than my personal name and I’m ok with that. I love being knows as ScrappinMichele.
This is a great example of why you need to choose your brand name carefully. You will become your brand name.
Get Started With Your Personal Brand Giveaway
Domain.ME has given me 5 codes to share with my readers. You use these codes to register a .Me of your own at Domain.ME.
Disclosure: I am a member of the Everywhere Society and Everywhere has provided me with compensation for this post. All opinions are my own.
My advice is once you get started, you must stay out there and visible. As a small business owner, many of our competitors fizzle out as they don’t spend enough time getting their brand in front of people.
You are right. Staying out there is difficult for some. They think you can just do branding once and never again.
Great advice for personal branding. I think it is very important to have great customer service and great reviews that is what I look at a lot.
Thank you Heather. Yes, great customer service is so important.
I was looking for a calendar that listed the whole year exactly as your example (2014 Editorial Calendar Template Year) but I need a 2015 calendar, do you by chance have that available yet? Thank you – the set up is perfect.
Tina, I do have the 2015 and I’m about to update my post for 2015. Should be done over the weekend when I’m at my computer.