The Internet is About Personal Branding

I registered clecompte.com a few months back unsure of what I was going to do with it. All I knew is that someone already took chrislecompte.com (a realtor of all people) and I was steamed about it. In the back of my mind, I had some plans and thoughts, but nothing concrete. I then realized something important.

The Internet today is about people, social power and name equity.

What does that mean? Through the vast growth of social networks, people have built brands for themselves. It’s no longer about pushing a product or a service. It’s about pushing yourself.

So, with that in mind, I decided to build up my name equity. And there’s more to it than that. Let me roll through my reasons for establishing a personal web presence.

Self-Branding

I already touched on this, but self-branding is a hugely important concept today. For the longest time, and even to this day, people have relied on the traditional resume to sell themselves. They packed in years of experience onto a page or two and handed it over to the lady in human resources. Rinse and repeat.

Resumes suck. They’re boring, one-dimensional pieces of scrap that say nothing about the person seeking employment. They say nothing except for the typical self-serving statements of supposed excellence.

Self-branding is much more powerful. It involves collecting the assets that encapsulate your professional experience and displaying it in a creative fashion that makes you stand out from everyone else. Self-branding helps you get exposure because you’re constantly broadcasting your thoughts, ideas and knowledge.

Here are some tools that can help get you started with self-branding: your own domain name, a blog, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. The tools are there, you just need to commit the time.

Self-Fulfillment

Maintaining a personal web presence can serve as a great source of self-fulfillment. By documenting your accomplishments and thoughts, you can constantly appreciate the value you’ve brought forth.

Your own web site can also fuel a sense of pride. Pride is not a bad thing. Pride is important in allowing us to keep our chin up. Be proud of what you’ve done and display it in a humble manner.

Selflessness

A personal web site doesn’t have to be exclusively about you. Many people have created personal web presences with the intention of helping others.

Whenever I’m in a jam coding CSS, the first places I find for help are personal web sites where dedicated individuals took the time to analyze a problem and come up with solutions. These people may be helping themselves, but they’re helping others at the same time.

Keeping with that view, you can share your knowledge or expertise to help those who are seeking your talents. The best part is that helping others often leads to good opportunities.

Timelessness

Your web site is something that you control. You’ll always have it (unless you forget to renew the domain name..). You’ll always have the power to keep it up-to-date with your own latest developments.

For most people, when they leave a job, all they’re usually left with are those couple of sentences they can throw on their resume. This is despite the fact that they probably accomplished numerous feats and met obstacles of unthinkable magnitudes. Yet it’s all summed up in a boring format nestled in the bowels of an antiquated document.

With your own web site, you can record your professional experience as it happens. And you can continue to build on these recordings. They never leave you, unless you remove them, and they remain visible to the world regardless of what job or project you’re working on.

Connectedness

With social media and networking running rampant everywhere, it’s an opportune time to meet new people and develop valuable connections.

A personal web site can help you initiate, establish and cultivate those connections. By getting your name out there, you’re making yourself known and proving yourself to others. The internet is a crowded place and it takes a continued stream of well-articulated thoughts to start capturing the attention of people. Your own web site can accomplish this, and while the time commitment may be high, the rewards of such connections may pay nice dividends.

Self-Measurement

Finally, your own web site offers a very valid metric for measuring yourself. How do you know if, over time, you’ve improved, grown, succeeded or failed?

Measuring these sort of things on a personal level is hard. Barely anyone sets goals for themselves. So, the least you could do is consistently measure your output. What have you accomplished, what are your thoughts like, what areas are you interested in? These are the types of questions to be assessing over a continuous time period.

The fun part is that a personal web site will give you a repository of this "self-data" that you can sift through at any given point in time. You can look back and see how you progressed to where you are now.

Those are the primary reasons why I decided to start building my name equity. If nothing else, it will be an interesting project and soon-to-be time capsule of my thoughts and ideas. And I enjoy writing, which is a bonus.