Time is usually our biggest enemy because there is only so much you can do in a day. If you think about it, most of our day is taken up by eating, sleeping, and working which leaves very little room for branding yourself. If you don’t have much time on your hand, here are 5 quick ways to brand yourself:
Help others out
Forums aren’t necessarily the hippest thing out on the web, but they are still popular. Millions of people use forums to get advice and if you can signup for a few forums you are interested in and help out one person every day you will be looked upon as an expert.
To get the most benefit out of forums make sure you fill in your profile and make your personal picture your avatar. By adding that personal touch you are leaving an open channel for communication which will allow you to meet more people.
Meet one new person a day
If you have a 9 to 5 job and work for a big company, it shouldn’t be hard to meet one new person a day. When you happen to be walking through your company’s cafeteria go up to someone that you don’t know and get to know them. The more people you get to know the more people that will know who you are.
If you don’t work for a big company or work from home, another easy way to meet new people is through chat rooms. This may sound a bit weird but there are chat rooms out there for thousands of different topics so start communicating with others.
Get to know journalists
Chances are there is a local magazine or newspaper for your area. Go to their site once a week or whenever you have time and just email some of the journalists. Make some small talk with them, give them critiques on their writing, or even tell them how much you enjoy reading their work. Whatever it may be, just start building a relationship with that journalist so that when you are looking to get covered by offline media they may help you out.
Participate within your community
A few days ago I wrote about the importance of blogs and how you can use them to leverage your brand. Making blog comments on a daily basis is great for branding but this can suck hours out of your day. Instead of trying to do tons of blog comments everyday, make one comment each day. When doing this don’t leave a comment on the same blog everyday but instead rotate between all of the major blogs in your industry.
Get connected into the business world
One of the best ways to brand yourself is to get to know as many people within your industry. This may seem like a tedious task, but with the web it is getting fairly easy to build up relationships with others. If you signup with sites like Linkedin, you can connect with others and get to know them on a personal level. Not only is this great for branding, but it can also lead to new doors in the future.
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“Meet one new person a day” – I can attest to this being a great technique. Basically, you never know who will generate that next lead for you or who they know that will be able to help you out down the line. I can’t count how many times I have met someone in a personal setting and ended up doing consulting work for them.
What if you’re afraid of people and they make you NERVOUS?
Twixbar, you need to get over that fear some how. I personally don’t have too much experience with this but from what I have heard picturing people in their underwear helps.
Good post Neil. Do you use your linkedin account when gaining new contacts or wanting to get introduced to new people? If so ,can you add me to yours?
I definitely don’t have enough hours in a day, these could help me.. thanks a lot.
Myron, I just sent you a friend request on Linkedin. If anyone else wants to add me on Linkedin feel free to add neil@acsseo.com.
Neil, I’ll check it out and thanks for sending it out.
Twixbar
I’m incredibly introverted, not so much shy anymore, but I cannot make small talk. I like small talk. I just have a hard time starting a conversation without a purpose behind it. So I have learned to turn the small talk into a purpose. I need friends, contacts and everyday people to help network with anything in my life and to get people to know you, they need small talk. I have a small list of questions that I go through with each new person I meet and it gets the job done.
Great tips.. almost common sense (but some of the best tips *do* seem like common sense once you know about them.)
I used to share Twixbar’s fear of meeting new people, but I’ve found that practice makes perfect. I’m still a little shy at times, but it usually just takes a little *push* from myself to realize that it’s never as bad as it seems — it can actually be quite fun!
Neil – Great write up!
Meeting a person a day is a definitely a good goal. One of the things that I do is go to local networking groups like meetup.com and join a group with similar interests. From there I meet the people I am interested in speaking with later and exchange contact information. I try and meet for lunch at least a couple of times a week with someone new.
Twixbar and Miracle – I am not fond of small talk personally, but one of the things I find is asking some icebreaker questions when meeting people such as: where they are from, where they work, what they do at work, what they are into or like to do for fun. You just have to find some common ground and the conversation can go from there. And definitely…practice, practice, practice.
Wow,
Some great thoughts and ideas here … people get famous everyday using these techniques!
Great Post!
Darin
I definitely agree with meeting one new person a day. I work at a big company and it’s easy to run into someone you’ve never met before on an elevator or lobby or something. All it takes is one person sparking a conversation. It seems weird to me that a small group of people, who see each other the same time each day, would stand in a small box for so many floors without saying a word to each other.
Linkedin is priceless. I’ve met a number of valuable contacts locally by searching Linkedin for people in my city and industry, or through a connections connection. It’s so much easier to build a relationship when you have that first contact and then meet over some coffee. Watch out for that invite.
Neil, You’re starting this blog off strong. Great ideas in every post.
Great to see this post Neil, “The Lazy Man’s Way to Branding” i have been experimenting with some of these techniques over the past year and they have been really effective. To my friends i call it “Cheater SEO” to other professionals and my students i call it “SSM” or Social Search Marketing.
One resource that i think should be mentioned is http://www.naymz.com, i have had a profile with this for 6+ months now and they do a great job of optimizing their directory so you will rank extreamly high in google for your name.
No link spam here, but if you google me, you can see my namyz profile ranks on the top, this same profile is also on the first page of results for the company i work for and the two past companies i have worked for
And of course interlink it with all your other SSM profiles and accounts.
Doing my daily round of comments.
jk
Nice tips Neil!
Neil, going to give your ideas a go – starting with this post! Sending you a linked in invite as we speak…..
Very good advice concerning staying in touch with a local journalist. Sooner or later you will have the opportunity to tell them what you do.. and eventually they will think of you when they are pressed for a story. If they know you, and know that you are approachable and contactable, they will publish your ’story’. And what brands you better than the media..?
whats terrible about this is that promotions takes more of your time than creation not when you do a little every day.
yet is it not the act of creating that we seek?
Luminosity, I am not sure if I understand your comment, but I will take a shot at it anyways…
In some cases promotion can take more time than creating new things such as content, but not always. I personally look at creating new things and promotion as being very similar because in this case they can both help with branding.
I like about the “meet one person a day” method. Yep.Branding for me take a hard of work to do so. Even my blog doesn’t had any comment. Maybe the traffics are so less. How about you make a post about “how to your comment from get attention from your readers?” Can you? Anyway, thanks so much for this worth read post.
Alpha, will try and make a post about commenting in a few weeks (no guarantees).
Nevermind. I know you’re busy man..Nice black Amex card you had.
Great post Neil, again!
I have to try this “meet one person a day” approach. If I think back, this is one of the most effective ways to get known.
Speaking of branding and LinkedIn, take advantage of the custom URL feature they offer. Under MyProfile –> Edit My Public Profile, you can edit your Public Profile URL.
So if you enter the text in the space provided, your new LinkedIn URL will be: http://www.linkedin.com/in/neiliscool.
Using some keyword combos could be interesting too…
Excellent ideas! I will start using them. Thanks!!!
Great information, Neil, thanks. I will implement these ideas into my photography business.
I sent you an invite to My LinkedIn account. Looking forward to getting to you as my New Person of the Day!
Thank you Neil for your advice. I too will start using them. I network as much as I can. And I intend to invite people from my network to activities of all kind. Thats good branding too.
Neil, It’s quite interesting to read your texts.
Thanks! If you don’t like anything, let me know and I will try and improve.
When you see a friend covered in the media, congratulate themand ask them for a contact at the newspaper.
Even better if you know they are about to be interviewed to get them to drop your name to the interviewer.
That sounds a bit too pushy. A better approach maybe to ask them how they got covered in the media and then go from there.
Sometime, its not that easy to go and talk with someone you dont know. But to my experience people who may look difficult to talk with are infact easy people to talk to.
Bottom line is that there are two groups… people you know and people you don’t. Obviously 1 group is bigger than the other. The more people you talk to, the better you’ll do.
It’s not about what y0u know, but who you know….I hae learnt that lesson myself, the hard way
There is no substitute for networking, period.
The thing is that you can’t raise a business by following a model or a piece of paper. You make that business successful by adapting to the market conditions.
Yes… you must be on top of what’s going on in the market at any give time. The better you are at doing that, the easier it will be for you to move forward.
The title of this post immediately caught my eye. In the military they always give the hardest and most complicated tasks to the laziest recruits, because they inevitably find the simplest solution to the problem. I haven’t done much on linkedin, and methinks it is actually time to start. Thank you so much for the prompt, Neil. I’m really enjoying your blog!
Glad to hear it Net Age. It’s a very clever strategy that obviously as you know…works.
awesome article as for me! I learn personal brending in free time and your article makes right advices! thank you!
Perfect, smart move trying to stay on top of your game and in front of your competitors.
Great ideas. I like the one about getting to know your community. If you can help out a small non profit and volunteer. You can get many contacts from just doing your part to help out.
Networking comes in all sorts of fashion.
I volunteer at the local food bank and health clinic, but I need to expand into areas I could do a bit more networking in.
Try to go to networking evens in the area.