This is part 5 of 34 in Poker and Making Money Online, a 34 Part Series.
Your “brand” is important.
OLD:
NEW:
Branding started out with a steel rod with your brand (or logo) that was then seared into a cow. That effectively meant that cow was yours. Everyone in town knew what your brand looked like and you knew their brand.
Today things haven’t changed too much except that now companies are branding us. They put their logos on our clothes, cars, computers, and just about everything else. Does that tell you how important branding is?
In order to set yourself apart from the sea of competition you need to establish your brand and make sure that brand is recognizable and reputable. Your brand doesn’t have to be your logo, it can be your name. Many internet superstars (not this kind, but this kind), are famous (internetely speaking, yes I just made that word up.) while others do indeed have a visual brand (Shoemoney).
So to brand yourself online you need to understand what people “see” about your brand. What they “see” is what they can find online. If you search for your name, do you find positive or negative stuff? It doesn’t matter if it’s about you, or about the other guy who has the same name. Protecting your brand is often called brand management or reputation management.
One of my recent clients had a bit of an online reputation problem. A newspaper insinuated that he did something he did not. He hired me to bury that story, which I did. His brand is still strong because what you see is only positive stuff about him.
When writing online, filling out sing up forms and commenting on blogs, consider this. Every time your use your name, it will be archived for ever. One day when you need that big client, and he goes digging, what is he going to find?
I have been reading a ton on how to brand myself and thankfully found your site. It is interesting to look at the point in which branding has come. I have been spending time and trying to create my own professional brand at http://www.personavita.com. It has helped me to market myself in the business world. I can list all my past work experience that has been validated by my colleagues. So hopefully when I am found online it will show my professional accomplishments.