Building your brand on the Internet is not just reserved for consumer brand giants. Twitter is not the tool to use for an all out media assault on brand management either. Analyzing Twitter for traffic this week alone for my site shows and proves that Twitter generates only one link per day of traffic to my website. So, all in all, tweeting is really just like the Verizon Wireless commercial when the dad is tweeting outside and his son is tired of him tweeting nonsense. Twitter will not help build web traffic.
I don’t care what your brand is, who you work for, or what you do, you should forever be selling your personal brand. Social media sites have proven this as well. I have put my resume on LinkedIn and it sat there for a year doing absolutely nothing until I started writing and becoming a thought leader on LinkedIn.
So, how to grow your personal brand on the Internet? How do you get seen and heard and increase web traffic and most importantly, how do you measure that traffic and consider it a success? Especially for the urban minority community and black enterprise?
I consult with many different types of people in my day to day business management consulting operation. When I say different types I mean it. From software developers, to public relations company owners, to songwriters, to scriptwriters, to book writers, to real estate agents, to actors. And, the resounding theme that I’m noticing is in personal brand development and the lack thereof.
You MUST look at yourself as a brand more than ever RIGHT NOW. Whether you have a resume on LinkedIn or a small business website from Yahoo Small Business, or a Google website. You need to do what a brand marketer does. Get yourself out there on the Internet and measure your success every single week. You must become an authority and a writer and begin to write about what you do and present that to people every day.
Mainstream America is already up on this and has mastered Internet brand management for years. Now, the urban community and the community at large MUST understand this concept immediately or perish. If you’re an Atlanta spa owner for example, you should set up an account at Ezine and start writing daily about the different products that you offer at your spa as well as talk about the different services that you offer. Without fail, this should be written about daily or every other day as an article that is published on the Internet in what is known as article marketing.
After you create your articles, review your statistics and watch what people are reading and how they are clicking on your website. Make sure you have a blog site from WordPress or a true website all your own that you can run Google analytics on each day. In one week’s time, my articles have been viewed 4,540 times this week alone from September 6, 2009 – September 10, 2009 and the week is not over yet. This builds credibility and your authority on business matters. It eclipses what you can do on Twitter.
