How Strong Is Your Personal Brand?

The web has really allowed people to individualize themselves. With the onslaught of social networking tools, we can create pretty strong identities. The big problem, of course, is brand control.

When someone types your name into Google, what do they find? Unfortunately, if your name is John Smith or Jane Doe, you’re pretty much out of luck. But if your name is a little less common, do you appear in the search results? Do you dominate the results?

If not, you could run into a branding problem. Branding is something you want to control. When someone searches for you, you need to come up first — and you need to come up in a result that you control.

Personal branding is something I’ve been working on. Here are my Google search results as of today:

Not awesome, but not bad either. I’d really like to get that top spot.

How do you go about securing your personal brand? Here are a few ways:

• Setup a Facebook account and don’t let it sit dormant.
• Setup a LinkedIn account and use it.
• Setup a Twitter account with your name as the username. Don’t let the account sit dry.
• Get on Flickr (something I’ve neglected since I’m camera shy).
• Set up a Google Profile (that’s my last result in the image above). Remember to use your name in the URL.
• Setup an Amazon account and review things.
• Establish your own personal web site. Get www.myname.com if you can.
• Do basic search engine optimization on your personal web site. Build it up and get people to link to it. That will help boost your rankings in search engines (that’s why my Bubble Frames entry appears in the results — it was linked to from another site).
• Be the first to setup accounts at new social networking sites. Secure your name.

Those are some basic tips to get you started. The hard part is maintaining your brand. Keep your social networking profiles and personal web site constantly active.