Define yourself. When beginning, this is the first step in branding yourself. You need to realize that you are very good, even an expert, at what you do. You surround yourself, either in your job or in your circle of friends, with others who are experts in what you know. Then, you begin to believe that everybody knows what you know and you see yourself as average and begin making mental statements such as “What do I have to offér that is different or unique? Everybody knows what I know.”

WRONG.

You have friends, neighbors, and associates that come to you asking for your help and advice. Or perhaps asking, “can you teach me how to do that?” What kinds of questions do they ask you? Ask yourself this powerful question:

“What sort of things are people asking me when they ask ‘Can I pick your brain for a minute?’”

Fire Your Financial Advisor suggests the following to stimulate ideas on who you are and how you can stand out:

“Do you have a certain skill where someone said ‘Can you teach me that?’ Or, have you overcome a certain experience, such as death of a loved one, divorce, financial ruin, raising children, passed a training, etc? Sometimes, we discredit our own uniqueness because ‘it’s just our life.’ However, there are others that have questions or problems that want answers that YOU can offer.” They go on to suggest you ask yourself the following questions:

“What was I being asked to teach or do when someone asked ‘Can I pick your brain for a minute?’ What skill/hobby did a person ask me to teach them? What difficult experiences did I overcome? What do I constantly get compliments on that I downplay? What ‘quirky’ things do I do?”

Be known as the expert in one thing – stand for something! Find your niche, something you are passionate about.

Create a signature look. Something people will recognize immediately. I’ve often told people if you were to find a piece of product literature on the ground and the brand or logo had been torn off, would you know who created the piece? If it came from Apple Computer you would. They have their signature look to everything they create. You can too.

This could be your unique name or a unique nick name. A buddy of mine has a very common name and has become an expert in social media. He created a signature and calls himself “SocialSam.” Laurie Pehar Borsh from Laurie Pehar Borsh Personal PR Productions has a simple logo she always associates with her name.

Maybe your signature look is a tagline. My son has a tagline or mantra of “No food, only music the doctor says!” Yes, he is a musician. For others, their signature look is their attire or hair. For others it is a greeting. An Irishman I know always answers the phone or greets people in the morning with “Top of the mornin!” This is his signature.

Maybe it is as simple as a unique business card. A good buddy of mine just handed me his new business card that looked and felt like a circuit board! What is unique about what I do, what I love, what I know?

Step back from yourself and ask yourself, how do others see me?

Become well known for one thing – you’ve got to stand for something or you stand for nothing. Find your niche. This is NOT the time to play it safe. Doing just enough to blend in to the crowd will get you just that, you’ll blend in and when someone needs your advice or expertise they will not be able to find you. Creating a personal elevator pitch with your “who” and “do what” statement followed by your “why” statement will keep you on track and focused on your goals. Without clearly understanding your personal brand, it will be difficult to stand out and be found when someone is looking for you. Your “who” and “do what” statement is a very simple thought about yourself. Keep it simple and easy to understand. It answers the question “who are you and what do you do?” concisely and in a fashion that is memorable.

For example, which says more and has more impact:

“My name is Jack and I am a business consultant.”

Or

“I’m Jack. I help business owners and sales professionals grow their clientèle.”

Simple, yet powerful. You answer the question of whom you help and what you help them get or do. Depending on what type of professional you are, your “who” and “do what” statement should include the following elements:

– As a business owner this statement should express who your target market is and what problems you solve for that market.

– As an employee this statement should express what problems and obstacles you tackle for your managers and bosses.

– As a salesperson this statement should express who your target customers are and what problems you solve for them. It should also express what goals you are helping your boss achieve through your sales expertise.

Here is another example. “Telecom Senior Executive who took a startup to $120MM annual sales with $28MM EBITDA in less than three years.” This directly speaks to a potential client or employer and says who you are and what you can do for them backed up by a history of success.

Now tell me, why do you do it anyway? Why do you get up every day to help them get what they want? My favorite interview question is “What gets you out of bed every morning?” An alarm clock is the wrong answer! I’m not looking for a specific answer but rather to discover the passion driving someone’s life. Your “why” not only drives the choices you make, but it also affects how others connect emotionally to what you do for them. The why is reflected in everything you do. It completes your personal brand.

Michael Port, Entrepreneur Magazine has this why statement: “Because I want to help people think bigger about who they are and what they offer the world.” He goes on to say, “I can go one step further and turn my why statement into a tag line to spread my personal brand and grow my sales potential, ‘The guy to call when you are tired of thinking small.’ This expresses the most fundamental, deepest part of my character.” Michael Port, Entrepreneur Magazine – January 2010.

Guy Kawasaki, The Art of the Start, inspired by John Doerr, says,

“The best reason to start an organization is to make meaning – to create a product or service that makes the world a better place.

Does the product or service you are pursuing change lives for the better? Change the world we live in for the better? Provide something incredible previously out of reach of the average person?”

If what you are doing provides one of these benefits or similar benefits and fits your personal “why” you are on the road to success. Your brand is beginning to take shape. Your personal brand is built on a solid foundation. With your “who”, “do what”, and “why” statements in hand and in your heart go forth and “make meaning.”

article by Brad Hess

Since Twitter’s launch in 2007, it has seen huge growth and has become one of the dominant players when it comes to social media. If you’re trying to establish an online presence, and have no idea what Twitter is – or aren’t using it in some way to promote your brand – you haven’t been paying attention. Shame on you.

“Twittering” has become a national phenomenon with its use trailing slightly behind Facebook’s. Recently Twitter shared some interesting statistics at “Chirp”, the Twitter developer conference.

– 105,779,710 registered users of Twitter
– Approximately 55 million Tweets being sent daily
– 180 million unique visitors monthly
– Signing up 300,000 new users daily
– Twitter’s search engine getting 600 million searches daily

Another Report, “Twitter Usage in America: 2010″ by Edison Research, that presented three years of tracking date from national telephone surveys, found Twitter’s awareness has exploded from 5% of Americans in 2008 to 87% in 2010. Another stat shows that 51% of active Twitter users follow companies, products or brands on social networks. For the complete report see: http://edisonresearch.com/twitter_usage_2010.php.

Having said that, the problem all along has been how to take all of this growth and turn Twitter into a service that generates revenue. It has always been free to use, but like any company, Twitter’s objective is to make money. Enter “Promoted Tweets”, Twitter’s new advertising program. It’s very similar to Google Adwords. Advertisers bid on keywords and when a search is done on Twitter, triggering one of those keywords, an ád will be shown at the top of the results page – at least in phase one of the rollout. Only one promoted Tweet will be shown on the search results page.

In phase two of the roll out, the plan is to incorporate the ads into users Twitter streams, of course only when they’re relevant. Eventually, the ads will be syndicated via third party apps too. This is important considering a huge amount of Twitter users access the service using various types of software.

The ads are clearly marked as such, and at the bottom they say “promoted by advertisers name”, as well as being highlighted in yellow.

So what’s the plan for pricing? For now, advertisers will bid on keywords based on CPM’s (cost per thousand impressions), and viewers who will see the ád. Twitter plans on using something called “Resonance Score” to help determine how well the ads are being accepted by viewers. This score includes factors such as number of clicks the ad receives, how many times it is “retweeted”, number of people who reply to it, and how many people decide to follow you as a result of seeing the ád. A low resonance score will result in the ad being removed.

Twitter’s pricing model will eventually use the “Resonance Score” in some way down the road, but they first need to collect the data so they can “better understand the value of promoted Tweets.”

Before you get too excited, understand that the initial launch of Promoted Tweets is limited to a handful of customers. The Initial test pool includes customers such as: Starbucks, Bravo, Virgin America, Best Buy, Sony Pictures. These are big companies with very deep pockets.

Advertising to Twitter users is not a new concept. There are other third party advertising programs already in place, such as www.SponsoredTweets.com and http://paymetweets.com, among others, who have been selling ads in Twitter streams for a long time. How will Twitter’s new ad program affect them? Twitter recently announced they will not allow third parties to inject ads into timelines. A bold move on Twitter’s part, and putting them in a good position to be the dominant player when it comes to Twitter ads.

Everybody will be holding their breath to see how Twitter users respond to this new advertising program. Some feel it’s an invasion of their privacy, and other loyal users fear Twitter has sold out to “Commercialism”. Whatever your feelings, ads are coming to Twitter – and who can fault a company for trying to earn a profit.

Twitter is a valuable tool when it comes to promoting your brand and/or products online. Those who understand that won’t mind a few ads, those who don’t – well, they can just take their ball and go home [grin].

I’ll tell you the same thing I tell every one of my new web marketing clients, “WordPress is incredible – and you should be using it for your website.” It can save you both time and money, while making it far easier to build a beautiful and limitless website that you can manage and control yourself.

Once you learn more about WordPress, you’ll understand why over 80 MILLION websites are built on WordPress, and why now is the time for you to learn what WordPress is all about, and how it can provide immense value to your small business.

Here are my Top 10 Reasons for why you should strongly consider WordPress for your website:

1. Incredible Power Straight Out of the Box

Immediately upon installing WordPress, you’ll have power features that make it easy to manage your website. You’ll have a Content Management System that allows you to add/edit/delete your content, including images and videos, a User Access system that controls who can access your Admin Center and what level of access they have, powerful Blogging software, and a central location to manage virtually all aspects of your website.

2. Quickly Build Beautiful Websites with Existing Themes

Forget spending $1,000′s on a custom website design when there are hundreds of highly professional themes for under $100. Simply find the theme that projects the right image for your business, install it in WordPress, and badda-bing, your new website has a top-quality look and feel to it. Any aspect of any theme can also be customized to suit your needs.

3. Add Powerful Features with Thousands of Plugins

Forget spending $1,000′s on custom website features when there are thousands of Plugins that can easily be installed and utilized instantly. Need a Calendar, there are plugins for that. A shopping cart? A Contact Us form? An Image Gallery? Yep. If it’s a common feature, chances are you can find a plugin to use and most of them for free. If not, you can have custom features developed.

4. It’s Completely Open Source

Is WordPress starting to sound like a website builder that you can buy for $5/month? In some ways it is, but here is where the similarities stop. WordPress is 100% Open Source and is written in an industry standard web-programming language. This means that your designer/developer is able to work directly in the code of the software to make ANY changes to the system and your website.

For instance, you may have a theme in mind, but the colors don’t match your logo. Your designer can easily go into the code of the system and change the colors, or the layout, or the images used, or anything. Perhaps you are using a Plugin, but it lacks an option that you’d really like to have. No problem, your developer can adapt it for you to any specification. With WordPress, anything is possible.

5. Focus on Proper Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

WordPress gives you a big head start in the SEO race by providing the core features for you to implement your keyword strategy. You can use search-engine friendly URL’s, edit the META tags for each page and include Header Tags and Alt Tags directly in the Content Management System. In addition, most theme designers take SEO very seriously and code their themes to strict SEO best practices.

6. Constant Development and Enhancement

Technology is progressing faster and faster, and WordPress more than keeps up. New versions are constantly being developed and released to take advantage of new technologies, to enhance existing features and security and to develop new, cutting-edge features that make managing your website easier.

7. A Strong and Active Community

In addition to the team that develops the core of WordPress, there are millions of active WordPress users that can help you in many ways. These users develop new plugins, new themes, provide professional services and happily answer questions for you in WordPress forums worldwide.

8. Keep Your Website Safe and Secure

You invest a lot of time and resources in your website and you need to know it’s safe and secure. In addition to security being hardened in every release, there are also tools that make it easy to keep backups of all your website files and data, allowing you to restore your website in the worse of circumstances.

9. Not Outgrowing Your Website

Your data, settings, and design files are completely separate from the core of WordPress. This makes it easy to upgrade any area of your site – whenever you want. And, since it’s open source, you can build features as complex as necessary. Once you build your website with WordPress, you’ll be able to grow your website to keep pace with your business, no matter how big your business grows.

10. It’s Free

Perhaps best of all, WordPress is completely free. Zip, zilch, nada. Just download it, install it on your server and start using it – without spending a dime on the software.

I hope this article has helped you get an idea of how powerful and valuable WordPress can be to your business. It will take some time and effort on your part to really understand how it works and operates, but it will be extremely well worth the effort in the long run.