Personal Branding Blog
The Personal Branding Blog offers branding and career advice from Dan Schawbel and his team of experts.
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5 Reasons Your Brand Should Live Outside of Your Company
My topic last week of logos for personal brands opened up a discussion about how to establish your personal brand in relation to the company you work for. If you’re a business owner these two elements are much more intertwined than the average worker bee out there, but for the average worker here are some ways to decipher the differences between your personal brand and your company’s brand. Your brand – your company brand 1) Focus on what you do for the company rather... |
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The Truth about Acting, Marketing, and Personal Branding
I have noticed recently that marketing, acting, and personal branding are intertwined in many different ways. The two seemingly different careers (or strategies) embrace similar goals. All three are in the business of storytelling, true or false? 1. Marketing is an integrated process by which companies create interest in a product or service. 3. Personal branding is an integrated process by which an individual defines a unique quality and experience to build their brand. 2.... |
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Personal Branding Interview: Zac Bissonnette
Today, I spoke to Zac Bissonnette, whowrites about personal finance for DailyFinance.com, and is hte author of Debt-Free U: How I Paid for an Outstanding College Education Without Loans, Scholarships, or Mooching off My Parents. In this interview, Zac talks about his book, why a brand name education might not be the best solution, and more. Why did you decide to write Debt-Free U? Why now? I wrote Debt-Free U because I believe that student loans are the next great consumer financial... |
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Lessons From a Year of Personal Branding Blog Posts
I’d like to share some of the lessons I’ve learned from a year of posting on Dan’s Personal Branding blog. A little over a year ago, on August 5, 2009, I posted my first post, the 11 Biggest Mistakes Made by First-Time Authors. My goal in sharing the following is to encourage you to post more frequently on your blog and to look beyond your own blog and consider posting as a guest on other blogs in your field. What I’ve learned (or, re-learned) Deadlines... |
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Personal Branding Interview: Mary C. Gentile
Today, I spoke to Mary C. Gentile, who is a Senior Research Scholar at Babson College and author of Giving Voice To Values: How To Speak Your Mind When You Know What’s Right. In this interview, Mary talks about brand integrity, the benefits of having a personal brand, personal branding risks, and more. What do you mean by “Brand Integrity”? Usually when people talk about “brand integrity“, they are talking about creating and maintaining a product... |
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HOW TO: Maintain Consistency Across Branding Channels
There’s no doubt that you have a lot of branding opportunity on the Internet today. With every newly released social networking or blogging site comes another way to brand yourself to this new audience. Just like a company’s brand needs to be consistent, so does your personal brand. A problem some people may have is that they sign up for a new profile and don’t keep their profile congruent with the others they already have. Not only is this confusing for an outsider, but... |
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Personal Brands: Change Your Channel
You probably believe you’ve dialed in reality by now. You know how you roll and how the world turns. You think it’s a rat race or a breeze, chaotic, or linear. You may even think you know who you are in the hearts and mind of people who meet you and interact with you. How would your life change if you changed the channel? That’s really all you have to do to keep becoming the person you want to be or could be. You have to keep changing – or at least re-considering: what... |
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Branding: Another Way To Make Your Resume Stand Out
Improve Resume Response. Whenever you deliver your resume by more than one communication medium, it improves your hit ratio. With e-mail the standard, most managers get far less traditional mail than they used to, now only the most important business communications are committed to print. When you send a resume and cover letter by e-mail and also send one by traditional mail, you at least double the chances of getting that resume read. Consistency is everything Contrarian Thinking.... |
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A Cup of Coffee to FREE Marketing Automation
There are no more excuses. Today is the day to spend your cup-of-coffee time gathering, assembling and organizing your shiny new email list. You’ve got about a half hour, depending on how fast you drink your joe, to pull together the following: The shoebox of business cards you’ve accumulated over the past 5 years Email contacts from your personal email account, along with any past and present business emails Email contacts from your LinkedIn account Email contacts you... |
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Automate Your Brand?
Is there such a thing as automating anything? Or, is human interaction necessary at every level? I posed those questions over dinner last week to Brandon Kennington and Matt Dotson, the two thought leaders who podcast Automate My Small Business. MATT: And you know both of us have been focused on the internet for most of the things that we’ve done, and I think it’s going to give you a really competitive advantage because I think all the internet businesses are expected to... |
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Personal Branding Interview: Harry Beckwith
Today, I spoke to Harry Beckwith, one of the world’s most respected marketers, has advised 23 Fortune 200 companies, including Target, ABC and Wells Fargo. Harry first book, Selling the Invisible, was named one of the top ten business and management books of all time. In this interview, Harry talks about personal branding from a service industry perspective, dives into how he’s built his brand, goes over some important changes and trends in the marketing world,... |
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Personal Branding Interview: Ted Nugent
Today, I spoke to Ted Nugent, who has been known for cranking his Gibson Byrdland and performing like a madman since his days with the Amboy Dukes. Ted is the author of Kill It and Grill It, and the New York Times-bestsellers God, Guns, & Rock ‘N’ Roll and Ted, White, And Blue: The Nugent Manifesto. In this interview, Ted talks about how he got started with his career, developed his brand, and more. When do you get started playing the guitar and make the... |
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Only the Passionate will Survive
I’m going to be completely transparent with you right now… not because it is something all of us “preach” in the world of Internet communication… but because this is where real and meaningful content is created. The pulse I’ve been dragging through my life the past couple of months and I’m trying to put my finger on it… put my finger on the pulse that has been slowly fading… trying (like many people) to figure it all out. I’m... |
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Personal Branding Interview: Colleen DeBaise
Today, I spoke to Colleen DeBaise, who is the small business editor at The Wall Street Journal, author of The Wall Street Journal. Complete Small Business Guidebook, and blogger at crackingcurry.com. In this interview, Colleen talks about the DNA of a successful small business, work/life balance for entrepreneurs, personal branding, and more. Out of all the stories you’ve ever written, which was your favorite to cover and why? It was actually a story about the New York... |
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Web Design Tips to Sell Books and Build Brands
Web design is usually approached from a subjective or an aesthetic, or I like blue! point of view; but if you really want your site to sell books, products, and services while building your brand, you have to know a bit about the psychology of your website visitors. That’s the message Susan Weinschenk delivers in Neuro Web Design: What makes them click? Susan is a Ph.D. psychologist with 30 years of experience applying what we know about people to the design of technology. Susan’s... |
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Personal Branding Interview: Malcolm Munro
Today, I spoke to Malcolm Munro, who is an experienced speaker, consultant, coach, and author of The New Rules of Engagement: How to Keep Your Superstars Loyal to You. In this interview, Malcolm talks about soft skills versus hard skills, what you should do if you have a poor manager, and more. What’s more important, having soft or hard skills at work? You need both. If you’re technically savvy and yet can’t get along with anyone, you’re fair game for layoff. If... |
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3 Ways to Take Your Personal Brand Offline
I’ve shared lots of tactics with you about branding yourself online. But what about when you take relationships offline? When you meet people you may (or may not) have a relationship with online? Although you’ll be in a different environment, a lot of the same rules still apply to offline relationships. You want to convey your personal brand as congruently as you’ve portrayed yourself online. And you also want to continue to create mutually beneficial relationships with... |
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Personal Brands: It Don’t Mean a Thing
Great parties, like great sex, depend on variety. Different styles, attitudes, even intentions: spice it up – give it that zing. Really great parties, like great sustainable romance, need surprise, along with the two other key elements of happiness: pleasure and meaning. So if your life or your job is no party: you know what to do. How often do you surprise the people around you? How often are you surprised? Do you bring them pleasure? How often do your bring them pleasure:... |
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What Type of Personal Brand Do You Want to Develop?
Your personal branding strategy depends solely on your long-term goals. You have to brand yourself for the career you want, not the job you have. This means that how you brand yourself online is completely dependent on your chosen career path: employee, entrepreneur, and consultant. Each of these types of workers has to maintain their online brand presence regardless of career phase and age. The difference between each path is what information you reveal, which domain(s) you select,... |
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Personality Rocks Your Brand, But There’s A Catch
Personality really can rock your brand to the next level; it’s the public face that makes you memorable. All the most outstanding commercial brands have a distinct personality: that green gecko with the funny English accent immediately springs to mind. The question is what came first, Geico or the gecko? The product came first; the insurance giant was successful before the gecko became a household name, because the finely tuned personality that makes it so memorable backs... |