More on "Developing Your Personal Brand"

There is a very good article on developing your personal brand in today's Wall Street Journal; It's a New Me (As Seen on Google), by Julia Angwin.

One of the vital components of your personal brand is how you show up in search engine results, i.e. when someone "Googles" you. Maintenance is required, which means that you need to learn a little bit about Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

When you enter a search term in Google, the search engine looks for pages that contain a match and ranks them, partially based on how many links exist to other Web sites. As Julia Angwin discovered:

I needed to focus on linking my online presences to each other -- that is, my Twitter page would link to my LinkedIn page, which would link to my biography on my book-publisher's site. These interlinkages are key to understanding Google's page-ranking system.

As a blogger, I create this linkage by attaching my RSS feed to Facebook and LinkedIn and by placing links in comments that I leave on other blog sites. For more on how to do that, see my slides in the previous post Developing Your Personal Brand Through Blogging.

If you haven't yet taken the dive into blogging, the article also provides suggestions for sites where you can establish an online presence by writing short articles that demonstrate your expertise:

For most non-journalists who do not maintain their own blog or Web site, it's a bit harder to create such a steady stream of new content on topics they want to associate with themselves. But it's not impossible. Ms. Drysdale recommends submitting articles to Web sites such as Squidoo.com, eHow.com or Google Knol on topics on that show off your expertise. "It's a huge branding opportunity," she says.

Great advice!
I also have been very pleasantly surprised to discover another way to get online "buzz". I use the slideshare.net site to upload presentations so that I can embed them in this blog or on LinkedIn. You don't have to have a blog to do that. It's sort of like a Powerpoint version of Flickr; i.e. a sharing site for presentations. My slides on Developing your Personal Brand through Blogging have received more than 500 views in the two days since I posted them, and the presentation also has been "Featured" on the site's main page as well as in the Careers section of slideshare.net. Putting a link back to my blog in the presentation has also significantly increased traffic here, creating one of those exponential viral marketing points of inflection in the page hits on my Feedburner stats.
-Mike