Personal Branding 101

1. Personal Branding 101 with Liz Downey Stonehill College ‘09

2. 3 THINGS TO REMEMBER ABOUTPERSONAL BRANDING • Make a clear, specific, and consistent image of yourself on the internet that reflects who YOU are. • Make people care about who you are and your brand by being likable and building credibility. • Your personal brand is a business; YOU are an entrepreneur.

3. “You’re replaceable if you’re not a brand.” -Tom Wolfe

4. Examples of Great Personal BrandsThat Begin Online • Perez Hilton • Justin Bieber • GooglePleaseHire.Me

5. Creating Your Brand

6. What Makes a Brand Successful • You have to be extremely tenacious, authentic and passionate about your field. If you’re not (also known as if YOU don’t care about what you say online), no one else will. • Your brand (logo, website, social presence & content) should also be consistent across the board. • It has VALUE.

7. What if I Don’t Know My Own Personal Brand?

8. If you don’t know what you want… Ask yourself the following question: What would I like to be known as? What makes me happiest? When do I feel so focused and absorbed that I lose track of time? Don’t bother being realistic or responsible. Ignore what your mom and dad tell you you’re good at. If you like something enough, you can be the expert.

9. Hit the ground running, but… • After you’ve written down some ideas, it is important to ask what other people think. • Branding is about perception, so you really should care what people think. • Filter out your haters. • Then, go do what you love.

10. Market Analysis • Who does what you want to do? Find all the powerful players. • Learn from them and buy their books. • What are their strengths and weaknesses? • What does the middle of the market look like? What does the top look like? • Be humble & reach out to those on the top for advice. • See if this fits in with your vision.

11. What Will Make YOU and Your Brand Successful?

12. BE LIKABLE. • Whether you know what you want or not, your personal brand needs to be likable for the same reasons YOU want people to like you in day-to-day life. • You also need to like the brand you’re creating out of yourself. • Be entertaining. Be funny. Engage your audience emotionally. Ask yourself what keeps you glued to something and what keeps you on a website. • If you’re not funny, you can at least be friendly. You know… likable!

13. Write Your Life Story/Bio. • A bio is the groundwork to constructing a brand that is truly you, a brand you are truly proud of. Before you begin the branding process, take the time to write YOUR story. • If you only had 30 seconds to tell someone who you are, what you want and what you want to do, what would you say? • The movie pitch bio. • Think of 3 Interesting and Relevant points about you. Elaborate. That’s a bio! • Have a trusted friend or colleague read it to make sure you sound both likable and professional. You’ll find that you need a good bio as we go on.

14. Build Credibility. • Aside from having a branded dot-com and a clear brand on Social Media, you need to be… • Joining professional organizations and networking groups. • Reading top books in your profession. • Following and learning from the big-deals. • Accumulating testimonials about work you have done. • Give seminars on your field at other universities! • Writing articles and getting them published on websites that sound professional (ie. Examiner). • Blogging about your field. • Joining HARO & ProfNet. • Making friends in your field and helping each other out.

15. Claim Your Name! • Own it! • Establish your brand as a dot-com. • Accept no less than a dot-com. • Buy up .net, .tv, .info, etc. if you can afford it. It’s good to own yourself everywhere. And it’s good SEO. • Mirror the primary elements of your brand (logo, behavior, topic, and BIO) on your Facebook Page, Twitter Page, YouTube Page, Linkedin Page, and Gmail address. And anywhere else your brand establishes its presence.

16. Build a website. If you’re serious with me right now (and I think you all want to be!) you need a branded website (logo, etc.) with your own domain name. • Meet Me [BIO] • Blog Page [Content Relevant to Personal Brand] • Work With Me [What You Can Do] & Testimonials • Also known as: Resume + References • Contact Me • Social Media Links • Press For your uses, you may want to buy a dot-com that is exactly your name. When potential employers Google you, YOU should come up. Not some porn star.

17. Getting SOCIAL and BLOGGING:What is there to say? • Anything you post on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc. counts as a piece of content. • To begin writing about your field, you need to keep learning about your field- what is new, what is provacative, etc. Monitor news channels that cover it. • Share and publicize what you write using social media. • Find outlets (professional-sounding dot-coms) and submit your articles to them. They could bite! This also helps you establish relationships with journalists who write about your field. • A lot of people sweat about blogging. I don’t. If writing about your field does not come naturally to you, you need to write about what does come naturally. Even if, at first, it’s totally ridiculous. You need to let your guard down.

18. Why Blog? Why Tweet? Just WHY!? • People who have profiles online are a dime a dozen. This will be your X-Factor that makes you more professional and knowledgeable than the other person. • Google notices websites that are frequently updated, relevant, and active. A blog keeps you ranking. • Through keen internet marketing, blog articles can have link-backs which builds search-engine credibility. • It builds you an audience and keeps your current fans interested.

19. Mistakes I’ve Made In Branding • Being the person who does everything and anything! They want an expert in one niche. • Narrow is GOOD. (ie. Compare Rachel Ray to Paula Dean.) • RedHotCopy.com • Tailoring my brand more to a general audience than as specifically me. • Remember: you have to like the brand you are creating. • See LizDowney.com versus LizTheresa.com

20. My Last Tip? Watch what you tweet. Keep personal SEPARATE from professional. Because they will Google you. They will see the keg-stand. And they will put your resume in the shredder.

21. The End.Go visit LizTheresa.com to never miss a beat.And follow me on Twitter @LizTheresa.