One way of becoming a successful Internet marketer is branding you. By branding yourself I mean advertising and marketing your name or your business or pen-name - whichever you choose. The main idea is to make your name known among your targeted customers.
How to brand you? You first have to decide, what you want to brand - whether it's your personal name or a business name. Once you've decided, you stick to your decision and start branding your chosen name. Whenever you do any Internet marketing, always use the name you've chosen. Get a domain by the same name, write articles under that name, write a blog under that name. Find forums related to your area of expertise and register as a user with the chosen name. Post in forums and discussion groups under that name. Comment other people's blogs under that name. Create reports, e-books and other products.
Use the social networking sites like twitter, facebook, myspace, etc to brand your name. Publish a photo of yourself, use garavatars. Try to use one and the same profile photo for all social networking sites, so that it is easily recognisable. Find friends and spread your name. If you're branding your personal name, create videos and post them on youtube or your website. That way people will put a face to the name and will remember and recognise you better, when they see you again.
When you're constantly branding you and your name, people will remember it. Try to establish yourself as an expert in your area of expertise and soon other people will come to you to get your advice on your area of expertise. Write good content on your website, blog, in your articles. Find out what your targeted customers want to know and answer their questions. When they get help to their problems from you, they will remember your name and recommend you to others. After all, mouth-to-mouth promotion is the best kind, because nothing is as valuable as a personal recommendation of someone, who has bought your product or used your service.
Make sure to take good care of your branded name - Internet is an unlimited source of information and it is much easier to get bad publicity than good publicity, yet much harder to get rid of the bad publicity. Whenever there is bad publicity about a person, people always search all the possible bad history on that person and publish old references. When you find that your name is wrongly used on a website or your content is plagiarized, make sure to complain about it and have it removed. It is very difficult to build up a premium brand, yet extremely easy to destroy that good reputation with a single event of bad publicity.
The most important thing about branding yourself is to be you - to be honest and sincere in your opinions, objective in your expert opinions and impartial in your reviews. If you can do that, you're already half way successful. After that you just spread the word as much as you can and sooner or later you'll be a premium brand.
Labels: branding, internet marketing, social networking
