Personal Branding: How to Make More Money by Conducting a Digital Audit

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Personal Branding: How to Make More Money by Conducting a Digital Audit on your Personal Brand - In the realm of personal branding, consistently presenting the essence of what makes you stand out happens in a big way online. With the increasing importance of the Internet in all aspects of modern life and its well-established influence in all areas of professional life, you need to know where you stand now so that you can start to build to where you want to be in the future.

Different generations have different comfort and usage levels with social media and blogging, so depending on your age, and how proactive you are with new media, your presence will vary. To make digital personal branding work for you, you’ll need to be proactive about not just using it but managing how you use it in a way that presents your best self to the Internet community. There will be more on how to craft and manage your presence later in the book, but your first step is to see what you’re doing now.

Personal Branding – Social media

Social media and blogging are powerful new ways to connect over the Internet, and their uses are evolving and changing fast. Even if you’re not an avid user of either, you’ve heard of them and you know they’re out there. Your job now is to get a firm handle on what you do and how that is part of your personal branding.

personal branding

A big part of your digital audit is getting a sense of how much you use social media and blogging. You need to be aware of not just what you’re doing currently on social media networks or with a blog, but what you’ve done in the past that is available for anyone searching about you. What you’re doing now is your starting point for building the personal brand that will serve you in advancing your professional career.

TO DO:

Here’s a list of things you can do to conduct an audit on your personal online branding:

  • How many social media profiles do you have? Are they current, or left over from a year or more ago? Do you have the same name or screen name in all of them? Are your pictures and bios consistent? What kinds of things do you talk about and what do those things have to do with your personal brand?
  • Make a list of all of your social media profiles. Note your photo and bio information. Also note how frequently you’ve been using each of them over the past year, and what you topics you talk about.
  • Do you have a blog? Do you have more than one? What about guest posts on other blogs under your name?
  • Make a list of your blog(s) and guest posts. Note the topics that you cover and the frequency of your posts.

Do more research on your own

There are plenty of free online resources for people who want to improve their personal branding, but if you really want to make more money from marketing yourself then you should find a few books and read them:

What is Personal Branding?
by Jim Kukral & Murray Newlands

About the Author

This is a guest post by Murray Newlands. Murray is the CEO and Founder of Influence People, a San Francisco-based online marketing and blogger outreach consulting firm. Jim Kukral and Murray Newlands recently wrote What is Personal Branding? How to Create a Memorable & Powerful Brand that Sells YOU! to help people learn how to market themselves.

Image credit http://www.flickr.com/photos/derekgavey/

  • http://goo.gl/WnVk9 Altaf Hussain

    Great tips, as the business world is becoming turned up-side-down, it is becoming increasingly more important to develop branding skills!

  • http://travelwisconsin.us/ Liane Markus

    I do not not how to do digital auditing but with the information and details that you have shared here, I was able to understand how can it be done and how it works at the same time. I know personal branding is not easy but with what you have here, things will be easy for us most especially to people who are into website generation.

  • http://www.addvalue.com.au branded items

    Regularly updating your social media profiles is definitely an effective way to promote personal branding. Through this, you can also get an insight as to what areas can be improved on. Eventually, your readers will then be doing the suggesting and all you have to do is just listen to what they have to say and see if you can make it happen.

  • Anna

    Very good “TO DO” list! You have lots of experience, it is obvious and you share with us very useful tips.They are helpful not only for a newbie but also for more experienced blogger:)

  • http://www.worldsworstmarketer.com/stay-at-home-dad/my-dream-to-become-a-stay-at-home-dad/ dave friant

    Great message of being consistent with your message no matter which social media network site your using. Personal branding is key int this industry or any other. I think at times I’m guilty of splintering my brand, thanks for a reminder to be focused.

    • http://www.murraynewlands.com Murray Newlands

      They don’t have to be completely consistent. For example, your LinkedIn profile can be more professional than your Facebook profile. Depending on who’s looking at your social media profiles, you can even intentionally make them present different brands aimed at different “target audiences” per se. But in general if someone’s going to look at both Facebook and LinkedIn (like a potential employer) then you should push a consistent brand.

  • http://travelwisconsin.us/ Liane Markus

    I am certain that many people will be interested with this if they will be seeing it and if they will be able to use it with their work and activity. Personal branding really is something very important to internet marketers.

    • http://www.murraynewlands.com Murray Newlands

      Liane, Follow everything on the to-do list and then reflect on what you come up with. Then change your social media profiles (and blogs) accordingly.

  • http://www.bodhost.co.uk Bodhost UK Web hosting

    These are some must things to perform to create a brand image.

  • http://www.makemoneyinlife.com JamesW

    very interesting and informative article, thanks for sharing.

  • http://www.panoramicuniversal.com/ Adrian@Panoramic Universal Ltd.

    Since this Post was made by a Guest author, so first of all My Apologies for not knowing the Publisher’s Name. Based on My own experience since last 6 years and after going through your post as well, I have got my idea more strengthened regarding the Social media management. We all know that any organization’s social image is much more diversified and versatile, and the management of the social networks also varies by the age of the users. For e.g. The youngsters always love to be proactive and share almost everything but on the other hand some middle aged people think twice and share only the most relevant and important information over the social network sites. One thing for which I am STRONGLY agreed is regarding measuring the social media progress i.e. Digital Audit. We should always know about our present location and our future Goals and Motives in future from Social networks. Thanks for publishing one of my Favorite topics!

  • http://www.exdeus.biz Free Android Application

    I have profiles on twitter, fb, linkedin, myspace, and G+ and I keep update all my profiles daily. Atleast, I do 5 posts daily on each profiles. I have some more profiles which I have connected either via fb or via twitter so that I can keep update those profiles too.