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.
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/