Branding your name

One of the most important steps in business is Branding your name. It requires an ongoing effort and is often referred to as the "good will" portion of your busines. A carefully built brand is worth more in actual $ than all the tangible assets put together. They have incredible selling power as they inspire respect when mentioned.

Here are 10 Easy Tips to....Branding your name

1. Decide on the brand - quite easy? Not always. Be imaginative. Whatever it is, remember to stick to it everywhere you want to brand yourself.
2. Start a Blog - it will give people an insight into your personality and what you're passionate about. In a way, it's like giving an interview to anybody who will listen. If you're going to talk about personal stuff, just be careful about what you say. Some sample pages to get started are Blogger or Wordpress.
   
3. Register your brand as a domain name - give people an easy way to get to you. It's your online business card. Nurture it and take care of it.
   
4. Actively comment on ideas and other people's news stories and blogs - I advise on NOT leaving spam comments. It will ruin your reputation. Try to add something constructive to the discussion. Take your time to do it too.
5. Put your portfolio online - If you are a musician, put your music on Myspace. If you are an artist, put your work on VoodooChilli If you are a professional, put your CV...where?. I believe the best professional site is http://www.linkedin.com/. Present yourself in a good manner and let people see it.
6. Update a page with all your collaborations - this can be done within your blog. You don't necessarily have to own the pages you link to, but make sure that you have something there.
7. Submit articles to online news sites - this can be within your local newspaper or a web site you usually visit. More commonly in the online world however, these are some sample sites : Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Newsvine, Tailrank, Technorati or Netscape.
   
8. Answer people's questions - this is quite similar to posting comments. The difference is to actually address a query another person has made. It will get you a lot of credibility if you answer questions correctly and it will get you on the path to becomeing a subject matter expert in a certain area. Your opinion will be important to other people.
   
9. Learn about Search Engine Optimisation - learn about what makes the search engines tick so you can at least make an attempt at optimising your blog and your sites to rank higher. A few sample sites that deal with SEO are as follows: Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal and Search Marketing Standard.
10. Monitor what the search engines say about you - Periodically perform searches about yourself, both on websites and on blogs (some sample sites are Technorati, Google Blogsearch and Bloglines). Use variations of your name and expertise in order to search this. Some search engines give you the ability to get alerts when something new relating to your search term appears in their index. An example of this is Google Alerts. If you can't find anything about yourself, you may want to join a few social networking sites. Doing this allows for there to be more online entries about yourself. Don't forget, most people still use search engines if they want to find you online. The more there is out there, the easier it is to find you. In the longer term, it may become a hassle to keep all your profiles up to date, but what you ideally want initially is to get your brand name out there. It's probably a good idea to not have embarrassing materials about yourself on the social networking sites you join, but leave enough information so that people can at least figure out that it's you. Some sample social networking sites are : MySpace, FaceBook, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster, LinkedIn.

To write this material I have used various recommendations throughout the internet and have also added my personal views on the matter.