7 Tips to Get Your Personal Brand Found Online

Article provided by Brand-Yourself.com
People want to interact with your personal brand on their own terms. That’s why building your brand online is so important. No matter where you are physically, getting Brand You on the web helps you attract unknown opportunities.
Today, we’ll focus on becoming visible on the web.
Before we dive in, make sure the username and name combination you use across the web is unique enough to stand a chance in Google results. To make sure they’re working for you and not against you, check out 5 Tips to Rank Highly on Google. Now let’s start making your personal brand more visible!
How to Establish Visibility for Your Personal Brand

1. Professional profiles. If you aren’t on LinkedIn, you’re missing out on serious professional networking. Create an account and build your brand on LinkedIn. Next, claim your Google profile, which ranks highly in Google results.
2. Social networking profiles. Be authentic and be safe here. Perception is reality on the web, so keep things clean, professional, and if necessary, enable privacy settings.
3. Directories. Create a basic profile on ZoomInfo, Naymz, Ziggs, and Xing. They make it easier to find you in Google. Think of them as a way to point people to other places like your blog/website, LinkedIn profile and Twitter profile.
4. Usernames for top-tier web services. To prevent mistaken identity, claim your username on Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Technorati, WordPress, Flickr and YouTube. Also consider an account on Vimeo, Disqus, BackType, Posterous and Tumblr. It takes a minute to sign up for each, and will save you a world of pain down the road if a belligerent ex-convict takes your username tomorrow.
5. Gravatar. Claim your Gravatar (globally recognized avatar) so your blog comments and online activity have a consistently branded headshot. Make sure your headshot fits your brand.
6. Photos and videos. Do a quick Google image search and video search to make sure you have no incriminating photos or movies out there. If you do, ask the owner to take it down or publish so much positive media that it becomes irrelevant. Visibility for the wrong reasons can be worse than no visibility.
7. Interlink your web presence. Now that you’ve laid the foundation of a visible brand with the 6 tips above, interlink your web presence to maximize your rank in Google and make it easy for people to find out more about you.

Don’t even think about leaving this page until you complete these tips. The only time you have to build your brand is now! If you have any tips of your own, I’d love to hear them.
Random shout out: Check out Phil Gerbyshak’s post, My Personal Brand (in response to my post of the same name), both of which are based on Meg Guiseppi’s popular Personal Branding Worksheet. Try the worksheet yourself, write a blog post about it, and I’ll feature it on our blog!
Article by, Pete Kistler and courtesy of Brand-Yourself.com for actionable tips to put you in a position of power in the job market

Originally posted by Candice A