10 Steps to Branding and Promoting Yourself
Social Media has arrived, since quite some time now, and it is here to stay. It’s going nowhere. As a matter of fact, Social Media and it’s various channels could be given the credit of disrupting many well established business models and strategies of marketing, advertising and promoting brands. More importantly, it has caused a revolution in how one can self-brand and self-promote themselves or their ideas and passions with the click of a button and reach millions of users world wide.
Most people do not realize that as much as a product needs branding, an individual too needs to develop the notion of branding himself. Branding “YOU” is on the rise and everyone is catching up to it. Having a presence online and yet further, maintaining that presence online requires not only efforts but a bit of perseverance too. Luckily, in today’s digital media we have numerous tools at our service to help us do that, easily and effectively.
Let’s walk through the key 10 Steps to promote and brand “YOU” –
Step 1 – Recognize your talent and interest
An idea is just the beginning, its nourishment is the entire process. Everything starts on the basis of a concept, an idea or a thought which one can realize to its full potential. Similarly, even before you begin to think about creating your presence on the internet, you need to take a piece of paper and jot down your passions, your interests and more importantly what type of platform are you chasing to make it a reality on the internet.
Step 2 – Own A Domain
WWW translates to the World Wide Web for a good reason, and thus, what could be more important and effective than to stamp your presence online through a website or a blog that you can call it your own. Having a domain with your name gives you a professional start and helps you maintain great credibility on the internet. If by chance, you cannot claim a domain under your name, you can always register a domain under your hobby name, expertise name, your passion etc. Example: www.thewisdompearls.com
Step 3 – Start A Blog
As we all know, Google is the pioneer of searches and indexing relevant data, which can help individuals and businesses draw traffic to their websites. Blogging adds to this advantage since as a blogger you would stand a good chance you end up much on the top in Google searches. Again, it would depend on how fresh and original content you can post on your blog and how frequently, but nevertheless, blogging would certainly add that 3rd dimension to your professional presence on the internet.
Step 4 – Social Media presence on Facebook
Facebook is the big daddy of all social media platforms right now, and it has a right to be so called, largely due to its 900 million subscribers. Having a social media presence on Facebook is equally important as having your own website. With couple of clicks you can reach out to hundreds and thousands of users who can stay tuned to your pages, follow your blog posts, become a fan and help you go viral. Having a Facebook page is the wisest thing to do, and to give it a closure, you need to have it in the same name as your website or the blog.
Step 5 – Social Media presence on Twitter
The next in line is Twitter, 140 characters, and you enter a world of micro-blogging. Having a twitter handle with the same name as your website, will ensure users to easily find you, follow you and tweet with your reference. Securing your twitter handle is important and this will open up the doors to all sorts of different marketing platforms and users.
Step 6 – Social Media presence on Pinterest
If you are in the business of appealing to your customers visually, like a photographer or a cake shop, a furniture manufacturer or a clothing line, Pinterest rates higher in priority than Twitter or Facebook. Why? For a very simple reason of being able to collect, organize and maintain Pinterest boards with your products cleanly pinned as a group. Pinterest would allow users to re-pin and share your products visually and easily.
Step 7 – Professional presence on LinkedIn
Enter LinkedIn, and you are interacting with industry professionals and experts onto a different platform of knowledge. It will provide credibility for your expertise and will help you reach out to potential customers with its rich 100 million professional subscribers database.
Step 8 – Engage and Interact
The biggest mistake most of us make is not striking a conversation or even worse not responding to an existing discussion. Customers, your followers, your fans like to be interacted with on a personal level, and that in turn justifies your genuine professionalism. Just having a social media presence or an online website does not serve the purpose, but engaging with people, taking part in conversations and most importantly sending and receiving feedback helps one grow and cement their presence strongly.
Step 9 – Deliver unique, fresh and viral content
Creativity is hard to come by, originality is not easy as spoken about, keeping your content fresh and making it interactive is even tougher, but having said that, one needs to keep delivering unique and interesting content frequently to increase traffic, get more people to follow you, engage with your website, talk about your blog. Stereotype material holds no value at all in today’s world. So keep that think tank ticking and start posting new content that adds value to the knowledge.
Step 10 – Sharing should be made easy
Easy to setup, but easy to ignore the importance of having the flexibility and the ability to have your content shared online easily by your followers, fan base and customers. Setting up your blog is important, owning a website is too, but equally important is to add the capability of sharing your posts, your news, articles and material online through social media platforms embedded onto your blog and website. Simply installing a retweet button or a facebook like/share button will enable people to spread your content to a large subscribers base and with 2 clicks of the mouse button you are connecting to millions of users world wide.
These are the key steps to broadening your presence online, branding yourself. Go ahead and let me know what do you think are other key steps by posting your valuable comments below. (PS: This is how I interact with you, engage with you – Step # 8 above )