Personal Branding – Create your ecosystem!

You have created your Personal Brand? Congratulations. It’s young, and pretty, and can’t wait to go out there and get them… Great. But your brand is like a Tamagotchi (remember those Japanese electronic animals), it won’t survive if you don’t take care of it and if you don’t create a ecosystem for it to grow and develop.

Look at creating your brand ecosystem as you would do for yourself: what do you need to grow and develop? A home? Parks & squares to socialize? Theaters & Clubs to entertain and be entertained? Same goes with your brand.

Your Home
Make your website/blog the center of your online communications. Depending on what your brand is all about, you might need more of one or the other but, truth is, ideally, you want both. I only have one word for you: WordPress. With little money, low complexity and high flexibility you can create exactly what fits your brand the best and customize it to your every need. I highly recommend that you get your domain name and self-host your site/blog, but if you really don’t have the budget to put upfront (max $100 for the first year), use the free WordPress.com service to get yourself started.

Parks & Squares
Use Social Networks as places to socialize, share and interact. The four pillars of your brand frolicking space should be: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest. More or less of each, depending of your industry and your audience but let’s not kid anyone, you want to be there, at least to hear what’s happening in your industry on those networks.

Theaters & Clubs
Use Social Media (YouTube) to enjoy and share entertainment content. It’s a “Personal Brand”, which means, there is a person behind it. Let it show. But beware of your online behavior: mind your manners!

So go ahead, get yourself set-up, create your accounts and make sure you fill them with keywords relevant to your brand and your industry. Next time we’ll work on creating your network and put those social medias to good use.