Branding Yourself

Whether you realize it or not, your personal brand is constantly being projected through your everyday interactions with the people around you and your online communications. Most of us understand the term branding when we discuss a company’s marketing efforts, but what some fail to realize is that our personal brands are very similar and have a big effect on our lives. This has become especially true with the new opportunities for online branding through sites like Twitter and Facebook.

Be Yourself

Branding yourself is so much deeper than just a logo or a picture. It is who you are in your core and it can not be faked or made up. People have become more aware of fakes and if you want to lose credibility quickly, then act like someone you are not and see what happens.

Being authentic is the number one best way to build trust with people. This is something that I have noticed often with my Twitter account. I have received multiple direct messages telling me how appreciated it is that I say what I want to say and that I am who I am. My personal online branding efforts have come from what I know best and my personality. This can be seen in almost every single thing that I do online.

Figuring Out What Your Brand Is

What are your core values, beliefs and passions in life? This will start to give you an idea of who you are deep inside. Don’t lie to yourself. Once you figure this out, start thinking about how can begin to incorporate these into your online activities.

How do others view you? Ask people to give you just a few words that describe you. This will give you an idea of the brand that you have been projecting and how different or similar it is to what you wanted.

Be Aware of Your Brand

While it is very important to be yourself and be authentic at all times, it is also important to remember that your online activities are public. And when I say public, I mean anyone in the world can see it. Keep this in mind with everything you do online.

What has amazed me is the increasing use of the Internet in the hiring process. Many companies are now making hiring decisions based on what they learn about the perspective employee through their social media accounts. Twitter and Facebook now give these companies more information about the applicant than the resume does.

Stand Out From the Herd

One of the most important parts of your personal brand is identifying what makes you different, unique and memorable from the vast amount of people out there. No two people are alike and you need to show why.

There is so much noise out there these days and it is impossible to listen to all of it. People may hear your message, but you want them to attentively listen to it. This is done through seperating yourself from the noise with your unique twist and viewpoint.

Business Owners

While your companies brand is important, the human branding is more critical. Most small business thrive off the the owner’s brand more than the companies. People come to your business because they know, like and trust YOU first. Please keep this in mind in your marketing.

I would really like to hear what you think about online branding yourself. Please share your thoughts and let’s start the conversation.

LANGUAGE WARNING!

We’ve all heard it before, “Life’s not fair”. My parents used to say it all the time. Something I’ve come to realize is that business ain’t fair either. But for some strange reason, most people think it should be.

I’m constantly seeing the complaints about this happened that caused my business to this. Well, who cares? I know I don’t. Shit happens all the time and it happens to all of us. But successful people acknowledge that there are some things they can’t control and choose to react by making the situation better instead of sitting around bitching about what happened.

It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.

- Epictetus

In business, the successful make solutions out of problems. Without problems, you couldn’t have solutions. I urge you to remember this when growing your business and don’t fall into the trap of self pity because outside forces are handing lemons.

Like my buddy Ori said:

If life hands you lemons, break out the tequila!

To your Success!

I was reading Seth Godin’s latest post today called, “I’m mad at everyone” and it struck me that I often listened to ‘everyone’ a little too much.

When I was younger, it was taking my friend’s bad advice. Now, it’s taking advice from people that aren’t qualified to give me advice.

Listening to ‘everyone’ tell me what’s right in their eyes, distorted what was right in mine. Well, not anymore! I’m going to take back control over my thoughts and quit letting everyone tell me why I’m wrong.

If we had more people in the world turning off the ‘everyone’ mentality, I believe we wouldn’t be facing some of the major issues we face in today’s society. Being bold and daring often times means laughing at everyone else that says you’re crazy for trying that. It’s the bold and the daring that will change this world.

Give me a minute…… Trying to think about all the times that I have told myself “I’m stuck” and never finished a project. What I want to write a little about today is ways that I have learned to not say “I’m stuck“, but “I’M FINISHED!“.

Note: Some of this I am still learning and writing it down helps me retain the information. If you have more to add about anything, please do! I will take good and valid additions to this article and amend the article, as needed, with full credit given to the author with a do-follow link to your site.

Only 1 Person

You are only one person no matter how hard you try. Realizing and accepting that I couldn’t do everything was such a pivotal point in my life. Before realizing this, I would attempt to do every facet of the business and inevitably each business would fail. Why?

Simple! It is impossible for one person to run a business by themselves. If it is just you running everything, you don’t have a business. You have self employment.

You must be able to delegate tasks and make your system scalable. What I mean by this is that you need to be able outsource menial tasks that do nothing, but waste your time while making it possible to work less and getting more done. This is the path towards having a sustainable business that can grow without overwhelming you.

Project Management Software – Must Have

I would highly recommend is begin to use project management software to organize yourself and your team. There are distractions flying at us from everywhere at all times. Seems that we are always out of time. Projects just get “lost” in the confusion. Why is this happening?

Now with DeskAway.com, I can list all my projects with the ability to assign tasks to team members that I have designated on my account. It’s awesome software that you can try for no cost here.

Cutting Out Distractions

Special thanks to Mike Stenger for adding how important this it to getting things done.

Distractions are everywhere! Especially for someone like me that does the majority of my work online. Every link can lead to an hour long distraction if it’s clicked. And this is every second of my day.

Mike brought a great point on the importance of turning things off or on Busy. In the book ‘The 4 Hour Work Week’, Tim Ferriss points out that every time you are distracted it takes an average of 20 minutes to get back in the groove that you were in.

Most things that get sent to you or demanded of you throughout the day are NOT emergencies and need to be as such. Focus your most concentration on the highest income activity and cut out all the secondary distractions. That means turning Skype to Busy, closing Outlook (should only check twice a day anyway), closing social media tabs and applications and turning the phone on silent.

Conclusion

The main thing that has helped me the most is being organized. Organization has always been tough for me, but I have experienced that the more I put into being organized the results come back 10 fold.

Like I said before, I’m still learning to become unstuck and would love to hear other ideas on this subject. Let’s start a conversation. If you’re response is going to be long, write a blog post about it and link to this article. Then let us know about it below in the comment section.

The answer to this question is what gave me the motivation to really jump start my business and not stop until I can have my “why”. For me, I started building my online businesses because I wanted to be able to travel and surf whenever I wanted to without having to ask someone else’s permission. And this business has allowed me to move across the country where I can now wake up every morning and surf for about an hour or two before coming home to work.

This “why” is so powerful to me that I will work as hard as I have to in order to have it. So, what is your “why”? Why are you in business or want to get into your own business? If you can’t answer this, it will be 10x tougher for you to get past the inevitable hurdles that every business owner eventually has.

This is a short post, but it was something that I wanted to share. Share your why with me in the comments below. Sharing helps you solidify your “why” because it is out there. So let’s hear it!