This is a guest post by Ben Johnson.

Becoming a thought leader in an industry requires expert level knowledge and vision, accompanied with the ability to communicate and align with relevant people. Social media provides that platform and power to reach out to people online and create a powerful and long lasting personal brand. Personal branding is no different than product branding, but this time it’s you who needs to be differentiated.

Developing a brand over social media is a step-by-step non-linear process and it will take some time before you start seeing the results. Remember, creating a personal brand is directly proportional to creating value for other people.

The Power of Blogging

Let’s first start with blogging. Blogging do it consistently and add value. Blogging provides tangible evidence of your expertise and achievements. Before starting a blog, setup all the on-page stuff. Firstly, buy user-friendly, easy-to remember, and content appropriate domain name, and then create blog theme according to your area of expertise and target audience. Meanwhile, set everything else like “About us” page with your personal and professional information, easy to use comments box, RSS subscription etc. Make sure that your blog is well-build for search engines.

Don’t forget to update your blog with quality and relevant content regularly to make your readers keep coming back. A strong, well written content can be the headstone of a great online identity, which in turn is a key element of a great personal brand.

Get Listed To Increase Online Presence

On the other hand, you need to increase your online presence. Therefore, register your blog with the available blog and web directories, claim with Technorati.com, and use Google Reader to store your searches. This way your blog will be easily indexed in search engines. Check regularly who is linking back to you through Yahoo! Site Explorer. Also commenting on other blogs within your area of expertise would certainly help in building connections with the experts.

Brand Extension With Social Media

Besides blogging, to further extend you personal brand, creating accounts on other social networks and media platforms help a lot. Like, Twitter, it connects you to other social media practitioners. Facebook and MySpace could be used for outpost and to stay in touch with friends, and find new ones, LinkedIn for professional networking, which helps in exploring business opportunities and getting advices from experts no matter where you are, Flicker for photo sharing, YouTube for video, Digg and StumbleUpon for voting, Upcoming.org for events updates, and Gmail for docs, readers and more. Creating accounts on all these would certainly give you jump recognition on social media. In addition, creating groups on social networking platforms give you an easy mechanism for communicating with lots of people in one go.

Time To Build Networks

After all the efforts, it’s time to start networking aggressively. Interact with people, allow them to reach you easily, thank community often for their time and attention, ask questions for expert advices, share knowledge based articles with your contacts and if you have mistakenly done something wrong, apologize immediately. Doing all these community building efforts grow you out as a natural extension.

Remember…

The concept of personal branding is closely associated to that of leadership and at the heart of its passion. There is much more you can do to standout and become a brand. Remember, Online personal branding using social media is depended on creating quality relationships. Try to look for ways to help those who are best placed to help you, they’ll be more inclined to help you, and if you need to call on them they’ll remember who you are.

This is guest post from Ben Johnson of Logoinn, custom logo design service provider based in UK.

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