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

Teleseminar Connections: What’s in a Name?

Our name is an important component of defining who we are. It’s how we are differentiated from and recognized by others. I love my name and still consider it my most favorite gift from my father. Our names give us an identity and when people use them, we feel validated on some level. Using someone’s name in a conversation with them can create deep-level connections that touch them at the heart-level.

Think about it. Who calls you buy your first name – typically your loved ones. Your parents were the first to call you by your name – the two people who loved you most dearly. When others use your name, you respond to them differently. It opens you up. You’re more receptive. It warms your heart. Read more

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

Teleseminar Management: Keep a Rein on Runaway Participants

As a teleseminar leader, it’s important to maintain control over the call from beginning to end. How well you lead will greatly affect how your participants perceive you. And this can mean the difference between them becoming your client or steering clear of all future involvement with you.

It’s important to set the proper expectations when you first market the seminar, and then clearly communicate and demonstrate your plans throughout the actual event. You need to deliver on your objectives while meeting the expectations of your participants. Read more

Glance.net: Keep Things Easy

A couple weeks ago, I made a post about Glance.net. It’s such a wonderful tool — so easy to use. And why do I bring this product up again? Because you need to use tools that work and that are easy to use. Okay, Glance.net doesn’t include all the fancy bells and whistles that some of the other webinar technologies out there use. And, to be quite honest, many of those bells and whistles only serve to confuse, irritate and alienate audiences.

With Glance.net, you can be up and running in minutes. You don’t need to have a virtual assistant or other technologist on hand to manage the system while you’re trying to deliver your presentation. They can be doing other things like welcoming guests, managing Q & A, recording with Camtasia, audio editing and such – not pulling their hair out trying to get the webinar software to work. 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

Teleseminar Emails: Test and Proof

Testing. It’s just not all that fun and it’s certainly not glamorous. Development is the fun part – ask any computer programmer. But if you want to turn out a quality product or just about anything else, you need to test or proof or do whatever it takes to make sure everything is functioning as promised. Why? Because when things don’t work, we can’t do what we do best and we violate the expectations of those who do business with us – whether they are new prospects or our already established clients or customers.

When you’re presenting teleseminars or teleclasses (pick whichever word works for you), you often send out a series of emails. You send early-bird announcements, regular announcements, week before, day before, and day of announcements. You might send other emails that include handouts or other things and you most certainly send a follow-up email with other details. In any case, we have a fair amount of emails to content with and many of them contain information and links to resources that need to be verified for accuracy. 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

Teleseminar Tools: Use the Appropriate Tools for the Occasion

The other day I signed up for a one hour teleseminar. It was a free course about a business topic of interest. When I signed up, I was sent information that included a telephone number and PIN as well as access to the webinar – a link and some other information. In fact, they were even kind enough to send this information, again, as a reminder, the day of the presentation – a technique I encourage everyone to follow. When you’re given access to a webinar, typically you expect there to be some sort of information presented on your screen during the presentation.

When it was time to join the call, I dialed into the telephone number and got on the line (after several tries of getting an “all circuits are busy signal”). Then I joined the webinar through the link provided. Well, there was no webinar. There was just a static slide that stayed up during the entire presentation. Hardly a reason to use expensive webinar strategy – and I know this solution is expensive because I’m familiar with the system they used. Read more

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