Value of a Strong Personal Brand: Increase Your Customer or Client Loyalty

Over time, you’ll increase your brand presence by continuously implementing strategies that express your unique value. The continuity of the message combined with the length of time you’ve marketed or promoted your brand will significantly influence your client or customer loyalty.

Think about brands like Coca-Cola® or Disney® which you may have experienced for three, four or even more decades. These brands have consistent messages. They’ve been strongly promoted and marketed on a continuous basis.

These focused efforts have built significant brand value in the minds of consumers. Familiarity, in fact, breeds loyalty. People identify and feel safe with brands they know, like, and trust. Similarly, you can accomplish this with your own personal brand. Consistency, continuity and time – these are the magic ingredients. Combine these with top-notch delivery of your products and services and you have a recipe for success.

About Tara Kachaturoff

Tara Kachaturoff is a Certified Personal Brand Strategist and a Certified Online Identity Strategist who works with professionals and entrepreneurs to help them stand out from the competition. She provides insight, creative ideas, support, structure, and organization to the creative process of personal branding. http://www.PersonalBrandEssentials.com

Define Your Brand: Be a Leader in Your Niche

Question:  How can you become the leader in your niche?  Answer:  Embark on a continuous campaign to nurture, maintain, sustain, and grow your personal brand.  Personal brand management encompasses all the activities that you undertake to promote your brand.

There are a number of strategies that you can use to communicate your brand on a regular basis.  Some examples include public speaking, writing and publishing articles online, blogging, issuing press releases, creating and updating online profiles on various networking sites and podcasting.  It isn’t enough to just do these things once.

Whatever strategies you select, they must be implemented on a regular basis.
Consistent and continuous promotion of your brand, along with providing high quality products and services, will quickly elevate you above the competition.  Likewise, for careerists, you, too, will stand out as you consistently demonstrate your strong brand attributes through your daily work efforts.

What are you doing to define and extend your personal brand?
About Tara Kachaturoff

Tara Kachaturoff is a Certified Personal Brand Strategist and a Certified Online Identity Strategist who works with professionals and entrepreneurs to help them stand out from the competition. She provides insight, creative ideas, support, structure, and organization to the creative process of personal branding. http://www.PersonalBrandEssentials.com

Differentiate Yourself: Celebrate Your Uniqueness

Your brand can be used to differentiate you and your business. In a world characterized by ever-increasing competition, it’s important to create a memorable impression in the minds of others. And the fastest and easiest way to do that is to have a clearly defined personal brand. Your brand is made up of all that you are as well as everything that surrounds you. We often refer to this as your brand environment.

There are many ways to differentiate you and your business. Here are a few examples:

• How you shake hands
• The way you dress
• The types of clients you work with
• Your niche
• The organizations you belong to
• The books you read
• Your stationery - it’s design, color, font
• The décor of your office or cubicle
• How your receptionist answers the phone

For the careerist, you differentiate yourself through your office demeanor, the department in which you work, the position you hold, your degrees and certifications, and by the types of internal corporate activities with which you’re involved, to name just a few. Added to this are the activities in which you engage outside the organization which are supportive and furthering of your personal brand. These might include publishing professional articles, whitepapers, and books; representing your company or industry at conferences; and producing high quality online content, perhaps in the form of a professional blog or podcast.

What’s unique about you? If you’re not sure, ask your friends or business colleagues about what they find memorable about you.
About Tara Kachaturoff

Tara Kachaturoff is a Certified Personal Brand Strategist and a Certified Online Identity Strategist who works with professionals and entrepreneurs to help them stand out from the competition. She provides insight, creative ideas, support, structure, and organization to the creative process of personal branding. http://www.PersonalBrandEssentials.com

Define Your Personal Brand to Focus Your Efforts

One of the most important benefits of a clearly defined personal brand is that it allows you to focus on the right things. After you’ve completed the personal branding process, defined your brand statement and drafted your brand profile, you’ll have a great deal more clarity about who you are, how you’re perceived and what you stand for.

Clarity brings focus. You only have a limited amount of time, money, and energy. By focusing on what your brand means in the hearts and minds of others, you’ll be able to target your business development, marketing, and other efforts more effectively. You won’t waste time going in the wrong direction. Why? Because every strategy you undertake will rally around one thing – your brand statement. So whether you’re developing a new product, giving a presentation, writing a book, or developing a new training program – your brand message will be the same.

Rather than trying to serve everyone, you’ll focus on your brand to make sure that it’s communicated consistently and continually. Whether you’re designing packaging for a new product or scripting the greeting on your voice mail, everything will paint a consistent representation of your brand.
Define your brand to focus your efforts. You’ll enjoy the results.

About Tara Kachaturoff

Tara Kachaturoff is a Certified Personal Brand Strategist and a Certified Online Identity Strategist who works with professionals and entrepreneurs to help them stand out from the competition. She provides insight, creative ideas, support, structure, and organization to the creative process of personal branding. http://www.PersonalBrandEssentials.com

Personal Branding: Create a Squidoo Lens

If you want to create an online presence in less than 15 minutes and for free, go to Squidoo (http://www.Squidoo.com)  and create a lens.  What’s Squidoo and what is a lens?  The easy answer is this – it’s a single website page.

Squidoo is an environment where anyone can host a “website” for free.  There are certain restrictions and rules around this, but for the most part, anyone can take a few minutes and put together something they can be proud of.  A lens comes from the concept of a blog.  A lens allows you to focus on something specific – in this case it would be you and your business.

When you create your lens, use a catchy title.  Include keyword tags that relate to you and your business – and don’t forget to use your name as one of the key words!  Add your professional biography and photograph as well as information about what you do for your target market.  You can even include pictures and clickable links.

Squidoo also offers a variety of add-in modules which will allow you to add all sorts of neat features including blog feeds, user interest polls, and video.

Because of its ease of use and many features, Squidoo definitely gets my vote as a great place to promote your personal brand.

About Tara Kachaturoff

Tara Kachaturoff is a Certified Personal Brand Strategist and a Certified Online Identity Strategist who works with professionals and entrepreneurs to help them stand out from the competition. She provides insight, creative ideas, support, structure, and organization to the creative process of personal branding. http://www.PersonalBrandEssentials.com

Personal Branding: Start Your Own Radio Show

A radio show is defined differently today than it was years ago.  Today, there are more options to record and deliver content than ever before.  So starting your own show is easier than you might think.  It still takes a lot of upfront planning and strong organizational skills, but if that’s not your strength, you can outsource all of this, except for the actual hosting of the program.

Hosting a radio show is a wonderful way to increase your personal brand’s visibility and credibility.  With radio, you can reach people far and wide.  You can improve your speaking skills.  And, you can continue to develop your expertise as you take a commanding presence in sharing the gift of your knowledge and expertise with others. Read more

Promote Your Brand: Write a Column for a Newspaper or Magazine

Writing a column for a newspaper or magazine is a wonderful way to increase your visibility and credibility, not to mention spread your personal brand far and wide. Both online and offline periodicals are always looking for new creative content. If you can come up with a good idea for a weekly, or even a monthly column, you might be just the one the editor wants to bring on board.

Many columnists do not get paid for their writing contributions; however, they are given a byline in exchange so that readers can contact them. And, you never know if your column might be picked up for syndication which can mean it could be distributed nationally or even internationally. In any case, writing a column for a newspaper or magazine is a wonderful way to promote your personal brand. And, you can always repurpose and repackage your content for other future projects. Read more

Personal Brand Strategy: Blogging

A blog is an ideal way to build your personal brand online. Blogs are the perfect communication medium for opening up a conversation with your target market. Through posting information and questions, to cultivating conversations with your prospects, clients or customers, you’ll be able to begin creating an intimacy that no television ad or radio jingle will ever be able to match.

A blog, however, is not always the best solution – especially if you don’t write well or if you’re not willing or able to post regularly.

Blogs are all about content. Their value to others is inextricably linked to the written word. Our words are a reflection, to some of extent, of who we are as a person. Others make a lot of assumptions about who we are through experiencing our writing style. When people read our content, they judge us as to our intelligence and education level, our personal beliefs and interests, and even our attention to detail. Read more

Comment on Blogs: Extend Your Personal Brand

Commenting on blogs is another effective strategy to promote your personal brand.  I’m not talking about posting comments here and there or just anywhere.  I’m talking about creating a strategy to comment on blogs that are relevant to your specialty or niche – places where you can really showcase your background and expertise.  And this doesn’t have to be in terms of a directly competing blog, but can be some place that is complementary to what you are doing.  For example, you might provide online services to attorneys.  You could probably find several legal blogs where you could showcase your talent and expertise.

Commenting on blogs can be an effective strategy for building your online identity as well.  That is, it will be helpful in building up your online ranking, both in terms of your name and domain name because both of these pieces of information are included as part of a normal blog comment.  This information gets indexed by the search engines as well. Read more

Write Articles: Promote Your Brand

Write Articles: Promote Your Brand

Writing an article to post online is probably one of the easiest things to do to promote your personal brand. Not only does it extend your credibility through the written word, but also it improves your visibility online where your article can spread virally if it’s seen as something of great value to others. You can publish your articles on your blog, on various online article submission sites, or with permission, on the sites and blogs of others.

As a virtual assistant or other small business owner, you can pull from many sources when it comes to article topics. Here are some simple ideas you can write about: Read more

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