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The First 7 Days of Personal Branding

• Written by Neil Patel on July 7th, 2007
• 19 Comments »

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Thousands of people are trying to brand themselves every day, but the majority seem to be making critical mistakes within the first week of their own personal branding campaign. If you haven’t thought about personal branding much and are looking to start branding yourself, here is what you should do in the next 7 days:

Day 1: Pick a niche
Branding yourself as being a jack of all trades isn’t easy. If you want to be looked upon as an expert you need to pick a niche and more importantly one that you have a passion for. This doesn’t mean that if you know a lot about cars that you should brand yourself as an automotive expert, but instead you need to figure out what sector in the automotive space you can brand yourself in. For example, it could be exotic cars, American cars, classic cars, or even sports cars. Whatever suites your interests and whatever you have a lot of knowledge in, that is what you should brand yourself as.

Day 2: Help others in your space
Before you start getting an ego you need to start giving back to the community by helping out others. Don’t think as this as a chore, but instead look at it as a branding opportunity. It can be as simple as answering people’s questions on forums, but whatever it maybe just make sure you are providing value.

Day 3: Participate within your community
If you are trying to get well-known in the automotive industry you need to participate in that industry. Whatever your industry may be, look out for blogs, forums, chat rooms, or even social networks that are related to your industry and start participating in them. This way not only do you start getting to know the average Joe, but you also start getting to know the leaders within your space.

Day 4: Network
Whether you are at work at a large corporation or you are online all day long you need to start networking with new people. They could be people within your industry or people outside who are just looking to learn more about your space. Networking will open up new opportunities for you in the future so make sure you know everyone that you possibly can. This doesn’t mean to be a networking whore, but instead actually get to know other people. So for this day I recommend that you get to know at least 1 new person on a personal level.

Day 5: Start a blog
Blogging is a great way to portray yourself as an expert. All you have to do is write great content every once in a while and you will start to gain some followers. I know you probably don’t have much time, but all you have to do is just blog once a week for a few months and you’ll notice that you are becoming better known throughout the blogosphere.

Day 6: Plan ahead
If you really want to create a strong personal brand you need to start thinking about the future. This could be thinking about how your industry is changing and what you can do to be a leader or just listing out all the future conferences and making sure you are there. The possibilities are endless so you need to think of how you can leverage the future to your advantage.

Day 7: Don’t expect the world
You are probably expecting to be well branded at this point, but you shouldn’t be. Don’t expect to gain much traction within your first week, month or even a year. If you are in a large industry it will take time to brand yourself as an expert so keep on pushing forward and never give up.

There are probably other tactics that you could use to start branding yourself within 7 days, but these are the ones that you may want consider starting off with. If you have more time you probably can do a lot more, and if you don’t have much time these tips should be enough to get you started.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 7th, 2007 at 10:45 am and is filed under Fame. You can follow the blog through the RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.