Develop a Strong Personal Brand Online – Part 2

In the first part of my series on how to develop a strong personal brand online, I talked about the human elements of branding, and why you should consider building a strong personal brand. Let’s go into the technology of how this is accomplished. 

The Technology of Brands

My friend and interactive media strategist Adam Broitman calls Google a “reputation management system.” I love it. Essentially, what Google knows is what’s true, as far as the uneducated are concerned. So, how does Google come to accept you as the authority on something? There are a few measurements to that at present.

• Inbound links from other sources – if someone is linking to your website, you must have information of value, especially if that someone who’s doing the linking is important.
• Outbound links to quality material – this is actually more for human love, but certainly helps prove that you’re a lively presence.
• Readable, searchable pages – if Google can tell what you’re talking about at your website, you probably are trying to offer something to the world.
• Constantly updating content – Google values freshness over staleness (don’t we all?)
• Listed in directories – Google wants to know that you’ve submitted your site for inclusion in the more prominent search engines and website directories.
• Mechanical quality – Google has a lot of other things it values, like well-written websites that follow standards, and it’s a little bit of learning to understand them all. Hubspot makes a free Website Grader tool that would help you understand a bit.

Develop a Strong Personal Brand Online Part 1

Gary Vaynerchuk could tell you that his personal brand is worth millions, but he’s modest. My friend and PodCamp co-founder, Christopher S. Penn, often refers to branding by ZeFrank’s definition: “an emotional aftertaste.” ( See the The Show with ZeFrank episode here.) I have some thoughts on how one might develop a strong personal brand online, and what you might do with one, once you build it.
It turns out that I have so many thoughts, that I’m going to break this post up into 3. This will be the first part: Branding Basics.

Why Build a Personal Brand?

You might already know the answer to this question. There are lots of answers, actually, depending on you, your needs, the way the world has shaped you. Let’s look at just one answer.
The easiest answer is that you might want to be memorable, and you might want to transfer your real world reputation into the online world. A strong personal brand is a mix of reputation, trust, attention, and execution. You might want to build a brand around being helpful (what I hope my brand means to you), or being a creative thinker (Kathy Sierra, for instance) or being a dealmaker (Donald Trump), or being a showman (David Lee Roth), or whatever matters most to you, and also what you are capable of sustaining.
A personal brand gives you the ability to stand out in a sea of similar products. In essence, you’re marketing yourself as something different than the rest of the pack. Do you need this? I don’t know. Do you like to be mixed in with the pack?