Claiming Your Personal Brand Online

A personal brand focuses the attention more on the individual as opposed to a product or business. This allows a person greater flexibility when working online because the brand recognition is not affiliated with a particular product type or niche. This strategy works particularly well with someone who has lots of personality or personal accomplishments they can emphasize. In fact, developing your online brand in this way is often easier due to a lack of competition being there is only one you! Much like product or business branding this strategy involves the use of exposure and repetition.

Here are 5 branding strategies that work quite effectively for building brand recognition that focuses on the individual.

Website

Grab a website and try to capture a domain name that helps to establish some type of brand recognition synonymous with the image you are creating. You also want to try and keep your domain name as short as possible since it is easier to remember and type into the browser bar. Of course the content you place on the site needs to be supportive of your image as well!

Blogging

Having a blog is one of the best branding strategies because they are so simple to create and they allow you terrific flexibility. You can get very creative with your blog in the way you design and market it while also being able to interact with visitors to your site. Once again be sure to maintain a clear consistency with the content and design as it relates to your online brand.

Social Networking

This strategy may be the most powerful of all in terms of increasing your exposure. Engaging at some of the most popular social network sites allows you to reinforce your 'identity' to a very broad spectrum of people. Not to be overlooked here is the viral capabilities you can benefit from by using social sites in this manner.

Visit Similar Blogs

Go forth within the niche that you are working and visit other blogs with similar interest to yours. By engaging in their discussions and leaving comments you can further increase your exposure and reinforce the identity you are building. An additional note with this tactic is to select some type of logo that best signifies your image and place in within your signature file.

Stay Active Online

Maintain your efforts since it will take some time to firmly establish your online brand along with the broad exposure you need to make your efforts really effective. Have fun with what you are doing and just stick to it! Before long your chosen online brand will be sticking to you like flypaper!

Developing a personal brand can be a lot of fun especially since your 'persona' is the object of the 5 branding strategies reviewed above. These 5 tactics need to be constantly reinforced with the 'unique' identity you want to associate yourself with in order to be effective. Once your online brand is firmly established it is important that your future activities and/or efforts remain consistent with the identity you have created. To do otherwise will not allow you to experience the maximum benefit.