Tools for Personal Branding on the Web

This week on MLM.com we have talked about various aspects of your personal brand. Are you ready to take it to the next step? At a high level we have a few steps that you can take to make yourself visible.

• Audit your personal brand (Google yourself)
• Secure a personal website
• Create and display value
• Share with passion and purpose
• Collaborate with other strong personalities and brands
• Be authentic and invite people to connect with you

Here are some tools to help you complete each of these steps.

Share who you are

Ask people who care about you to give you 5 keywords that describe your passion. Are they the three words you want to describe you? Are they consistent with how you project yourself through social media and in person? This is a very authentic way to go. Evaluate their responses and add a few adjectives or core values of your own. Next, ask yourself how you want to be seen in an authentic way and begin to create things online that are descriptive of the persona you want the world to see. People intuit and respond to authenticity. The more authentic the persona, the more people will become your fans.

These words that describe you will help you choose social media images and website images that will work with your brand. You will want to keep these words written down and review them with all the visibility you create online. You will hear people often refer to their mission statement and they might also include some of the key words that describe their brand.

There are many website and blog building tools online. However, if you are feeling a bit overwhelmed at the thought of building a website for your personal brand, here is one service that will do it for you called Brandyourself.com. I recommend using the headstart service for two payments of $399 and $20 a month. If this is above your budget there are some great options and themes that are free at wordpress that will also do the trick.

Photo Link: https://brandyourself.com/

Show your passion

Do you feel motivated when you go to events or hear speeches from top leaders in your network marketing or party plan company? You have this same ability to inspire. What it requires is passion and practice. Find small audiences that share your passion. I recommend that you identify 3 passions in your life. Some people say they are just passionate about growing their business, but having other passions makes you more relatable and intriguing to specific audiences. Yes, the first one or two might be easy. However, if you struggle with the third, consider these questions: What are your successes? What have your mentors done for you? What has made you feel rewarded in life? Who are the people you admire and why?

Next, create your social media accounts

It sounds easy but often people feel lost or as though they might not have the graphics or skills needed to add images to social media. By using the same images or similar images in all of your social media you will start to have a cohesive branding message. To take it to the next level, add ways for people to contact you into the images that you use on social media.

If you already have branding on all of your social media accounts, the next step is to pre-plan your posts for the next 30 or 60 days. This is a fun activity but remember to be purposeful in your message. Create ways for people to become a part of your community and your communications through joining a newsletter. One of my favorite tools for newsletters is MailChimp. It has lots of tools for making beautiful and functional emails and it’s free if you have less than 2000 subscribers, and send less than 12,000 e-mails per month. The price scales up based on the actual number of subscribers and e-mails, so you pay only for what you need as your business grows.

Photo Link: http://eepurl.com/bdfl8P

Help for social media, graphic design on a budget

Higher a graphic designer to make 10 to 20 social media posts for you. Graphic Design no longer has to cost $30 or $50 an hour. You can find excellent help at a little site called Fiverr. I use fiverr to help me do those things that need a skilled touch.

Photo Link: https://www.fiverr.com/s/7li83x

Photos of you are essential

Take photos of yourself and put them into social media. You will want to feel your best in your photos. Find two or three activities such as music, a day at the spa, or spending the day outdoors to get you ready for your photoshoot. This will help you overcome any camera shyness. Remember, you will want to do photoshoots often so don’t get too attached to the outcome of a single photo. Your photo collection should grow as you grow your visibility of your personal brand.

Not all your photos have to be done by a professional photographer. For the sake of authenticity and showing your personal brand to your audience, there are many types of photos you can take. Create photos about your life and the things, people, and places you love. Take pictures of yourself, your home, your favorite restaurant, and your best friends. Speaking engagements, meeting famous people, giving service, or doing charity work are all engaging photos to share on social media and your personal website.

Promote your passion, your products/services, and business opportunity

Communicate frequently on social media, through video, written posts, photos and recorded audio. I recently found a great tool that lets you put audio files into a widget that you can then place on your blog. It is called SoundCloud.

Next, I want to talk about a more active and fast way to promote your business. This recommendation can be as small or as big as you like. But if you really want to go big here is what I suggest. Become friends with influencers. Interview them, invite them to create videos and photos together, build fun events with them, whatever it takes to become friends and add value to what they are doing while getting your name associated with them.

This idea is not new. In the ‘80s several MLM distributors grew their business with something called “tape of the month”. They’d record interviews, success stories, and people talking about their passion for the business, and then send the tapes out to their downlines. Now that we have the internet and HD Video, you can skip the postage and do the same on social media and the web.

Before you meet influencers, people with amazing email lists and thousands of followers on social media, create your pitch. In your first few moments of talking with an influencer they will be looking for the same thing you are, a way to promote themselves. Talk about how you add value and give them an offer they can’t refuse: an interview, your resources, and access to your social media and visibility in your next email or youtube post.

If you want to record a call with an influencer you could use your ipad with SoundCloud or you could become familiar with FreeConferenceCall and record an audio conference call with an influencer.

Photo Link: http://tinarawlins.rootjazzsou.c2strack.com

To conclude, there are many ways to promote your personal brand. Don’t get overwhelmed. Tackle one or two big ideas and then leverage them until you are ready to go on to the next promotion task. You will be surprised how confidence, knowing your core values, and being passionate about yourself as a brand will take you very far in developing your connection to your audience.