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Thursday 5 September 2013

Personal Branding and Blogging as Personal Branding Tool

Hey there,

Today I am going to talk about personal branding and Blogging as best tool to create strong personal branding. I will try to make it as simpler and short as possible. But bare the length if you find it long because i believe if you give information then give it completely or don't give it because half information is worst than no information. Now coming on the topic,

Recently I have visited few business events related to digital marketing and have also been part of international business event campaigns for vary industries. And what I get to learn from all those exhibitors, speakers and visitors of the event is Personal branding is the most important and mandatory part somehow. Why? how? let's talk on that in detail.

First of all what is the meaning of Personal Branding?
In Simplest words, Be Famous. In simple language with brief I would say, do something unique so people of your community or world start knowing you by your own name. In more simpler world, people start searching for you on search engines rather than on social media sites. And you can set milestone that Google show your knowledge graph in Google search result when people search for you as result of your efforts to build a brand.

For those who are not technical people, knowledge graph is information including your name, detail, pictures, etc Google shows in sidebar. For example when you search for Shakespeare, Google will show you the knowledge graph of him in sidebar, marked in red in below image.

Google Knowledge Graph Example

In more detail, When people start talking about you, start following you and start knowing you by your own name is known as building a personal brand.

Benefits of Building brand:
Finding your own Qualities and enhancement of self-awareness
It will allow you to find your own unique qualities and pitfalls by critics as well. You can take complaints or criticism as feedback and can work on it to improve yourself as a person or professional. As you start getting progress and build your brand you will learn what people like about you and what you should work on to be more better. As you start improving it will also get you tremendous self confidence

Personal or professional network expansion & socialization
As you will start taking interest in particular niche domain & building your brand in it, you will start finding people from your community who belongs to the same nature or profession. Your network of friends or business will start getting expanded. It will make you more socialized in niche work or interest domain.

Be more closer to targeted Audience
As your network starts growing you will get an opportunity to be tightly coupled with the people of your targeted domain or of the same/vary  nature to you which will lead you to learn more from experts and vary nature people of your community and enhance your skills and expertise. It will also allow you to enhance both your professional and personal skills and can also increase your productivity. As you will get constant feedback & opportunity to polish qualities and decrease loopholes or dissatisfaction.

Gain self confidence & your hidden capabilities
Personal branding will make you more closer to yourself  and allow you to know your qualities which you might not find otherwise. As you start exploring yourself you will get to know the uniqueness of yours and hidden capabilities. one by one your internal coating will get uncovered and you will experience the uniqueness and improve own satisfaction ratio.

Standout of the competition
If you are professional and involved in business anyhow weather you are an enterpruner or an employee, you will start leaving mark everywhere. You don't need to be in the rat race or don't need to worry about the sales. As once you start getting famous, your product will start getting sold without any hassle :) If you are one of like me who is not interested in being enterpruner and happy to be an employee, then you don't need to wander for good job and your bosses will do everything to keep you in their firm as you will bring them potential business :) You will feel the empowerment!!

Get support with no Effort
You will start getting support for any of your cause and people will make efforts to get you the necessary support for you. Support could be anything weather it's investors for new business product or donations for charity or something else. People will worry for you, you won't need to :)

Make you stand apart from the crowd
As I already state it will make you known and followed by the people. You will not get lost in crowd of people with having diversified skills and knowledge. In online world, digital branding is also known as creating unique resume where people wont ask you the question tell me something about yourself. In fact, they will start explaining about your self to others.

Easy to Measure Success
You can easily measure your success by watching increase in your followers. You can also work out to improve if you see downfall by working on weakness and boosting your strength by constant efforts. Easiest way is as I mentioned before set a milestone of getting Google Knowledge graph for yourself . :)

Feel Special
Being important to someone make you feel out of the world. As people start following you, as they start adore you. When they come to you and try to prove you that they are your fan. It make you feel awesome. And I am saying this from my own experience. When a girl came to me and said I am your fan and I was looking for you online since 2-3 years but couldn't find you. She was the reader of my previous blog and when I stop writing she missed contact of mine :) I felt awesome when from a crowd of 30-40 people she recognized a silently sitting girl and told her she is fan of her :) which lead me somewhere to write this blog and build my brand too

Coming back to the topic

Now How to do Personal Branding  or how to build personal brand?
There are many ways of building personal brand. Like
  • Be a Television or Movie Actor
  • Be a politician
  • Be a public figure 
  • Be an active Social Worker
Sounds crazy or impossible for you? There is one simpler way, Be a blogger or an Author. All the above mentioned ways might failed or may be difficult but being a blogger is very much easy way for anyone. As you know in digital world Blog is a platform which allows you to speak what you feel. You can represent your views, thoughts in simplest way ever and in language you feel most comfortable with and you can be a public figure and build your own brand. I can give you the example of few people who get famous because of their blogging and started a trend somehow who stands out of others were Matt Cutts - Google Web Spam Head, Danny Sullivian - editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land. What? do you think they gained it because of their industry? Then what would you say about Malala Yousafzai? A normal Pakistani girl who started a revolution by her blogging.

How to use Blogging as Personal Branding Tool?
Are you confused or thinking that it needs profound technical knowledge of blogging and technology? Neah.. it's not like that, it's damn easy. Here are the simplest steps ever for being blogger:
  • First of all select any blogging platform. Some free, easy to use & most popular platforms are wordpress, Blogger, tumblr, etc.
  • Think the domain name you would like reserve where you will post your thoughts and knowledge
  • Think the subject domain you would like to write on. Not to worry about subject much, it can be mixed like you can write post showing your technology knowledge and your weekend fun at same blog under different category :) Because blog is your own place [My previous blog has that title Ash - It's my place :D where i written whatever I want to & it worked quite well ;) ]
  • Start writing in your own language.
Sounds easy? you don't need to worry about grammar or spelling or language as people do overlook small things as they like to read good information. You even don't need to be an experienced writer to becoming a blogger because people appreciate the simple day to day language because there are thousands of professional writers online, you don't need to be one of them running for views. Just be yourself, use your language and people will like it and that's I'm saying by my personal blogging experience. I have never done any marketing or SEO for my previous blog which i used to write anything i like to and it got 1000+ visits from US. I was also surprised when I get to know that figure. Here is the proof





I have stopped writing since long time on it about a year or two on that blog and the image above is the screenshot I took just now. The blog still gets visitors. I used to write that blog at midnight after tiring day so never did proof reading. sometimes me myself don't know what I might written. I just write it with thinking I am writing it for myself  and self satisfaction. So blogging is anyone's cup of tea. Even if you are shy or reserved. Writing a blog is something like talking with ourselves and when we publish it others can read what we think and feel about something or how much sound knowledge we have about some technology or aea. The only thing required is activeness in Blogging. Because if you stop writing blog after few posts you will be lost in the forest of bloggers as you will start loosing your visitors and followers and wont be able to create your brand which is our sole purpose for blogging, right? .

Even if you don't want to build your brand, I suggest you to be a blogger. As it will allow you to meet yourself, increase your self-confidence, allow you to know what is current trend in market, what people like about you and you can find similarly crazy people from the glob :)

So what are you waiting for? Start writing.. start blogging and start building your brand...

If you have any confusion or query, or if you want some help, or if you are looking out for information/knowledge on any specific SEO or digital marketing topic, just put your comment or message, I will surely try to help out in possible ways :)

Feedback are warmly welcome, weather positive or negative :)


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