Manage your Brand

This blog came along because of post I read on ReadWriteWeb.  The post that caught my eye was about managing your online brand (4 Strategies for Managing your Online Brand).  I looked at it because part of my duties currently is running our website, blog, facebook, twitter, & email blasts.  So yeah, online branding is important to me.

Surprisingly it was about managing your personal online brand.  I’m thinking of starting my own company.  I need to work on my own brand.  The people I work with know I’m smart, creative, and hard working.  However, people I’m going to be asking to borrow money from have no idea who I am at all.

The two suggestions that made me decide to launch this blog: Content Marketing & Curate to Reinforce.

Proactively do content marketing, RWW says. “Content marketing is creating relevant and valuable information for prospects and customers as part of a brand’s overall marketing mix”.  Why haven’t I been doing that before.  I need to market myself as a savvy business person.  I am a fairly savvy business person (I think).  How do I get others to see this?  Their suggestion: “Aggregate and Curate to reinforce”.   How does one do this?  Create a blog, comment on other blogs.  Not in an annoying, obviously self-promotional way, but in a way that actually shows you read what was written and have genuine insight.

By starting a blog about what you actually do, you show people what you actually think about the business that you’re in.  One of the blogs I recently subscribed to is about store fixtures.  The writer works for a fixture company.  He doesn’t self-promote his products (though occasionally the products of his company will show up), but shows how various stores utilize fixtures in sometimes new and creative ways.  By doing this he establishes himself as a person who is knowledgeable in this industry.  If I were thinking of buying some fixtures, why wouldn’t he be the first person I’d consider asking?

So with the knowledge I gleaned from Read Write Web, I’m launching my brand: Joe Robles, future entrepreneur.