15 Days of Marketing Day Seven: Building Your Brand through Self-Promotion

Today’s and tomorrow’s posts will be all about building your brand.  Now that you’ve got the attention of some PR people and your readership is increasing you want to give them a reason to keep coming back for more.  This reason might be your cunning wit, your quirky sense of humor, your expert-level knowledge on a niche subject, or simply articulating meaningful lessons learned from simple every day life.  Heck, it might be all of the above!

Today I’m going to show you how to toot your own horn.  I’m a big fan of tooting other peoples’ horns before tooting your own, but for all intents and purposes of this series, I’m going to stray from that this time.  But trust me, I promise there is a method to this madness.

First of all, you need to create a great biography page on your blog.  Call it “Bio”, call it “About”, but let your readers and visitors know who you are.  You want to keep the tone less formal, then say a resume, but you also want it to jump out at anyone who may want to work with you.  And when I say work with you, I mean PAY you.  Think about who you are and what makes you different.  It doesn’t have to be long, in fact, two paragraphs are plenty.  And it doesn’t have to be all about your educational and professional background. Here are some questions to help craft your bio:

• Did you have an interesting childhood that some might not know about?
• Where did you go to college?  If you didn’t go to college, what did you do instead?
• Talk about an unusual job you held that you might not put on your resume but humbled you all the same. (For example, many don’t know that I applied to be a Santa’s Elf at the mall in college but was hired to be a manager.  Trust me, you learn a lot about management in that role on Christmas Eve).
• Have you traveled abroad?
• How long have you been blogging/building your business/online.
• If you’ve made some tough lifestyle choices, talk about it.  Bare your soul (if you’re comfortable).
• What’s your dream job?  Even if it’s being a tour guide at Universal Studios, tell us.  Expose what you daydream about a little.

The idea is to make it fun and memorable.  But make sure you write it for yourself too.  If you’re not true to who you are, no one else is going to believe you either.

The next step is to create a Press & Blog Coverage page.  Wha-wha-what you say?  Yes.  Some of you might know this already but this blog, JessicaKnows, started out as a Press & Blog Coverage page.  I used it as a virtual business card.  When I say “press and blog coverage” I don’t necessarily mean The Today Show or Oprah (although, by all means, if you’ve appeared on either, add them…NOW!)  If another blogger interviews or profiles you, this is an example of blog coverage.  If you get interviewed for a podcast or webcast, those types of media belong on this page too.  You might start with just a few and it’s likely it will build up slowly.  The old school way was to add fellow bloggers that mentioned you to a blog roll.  This is even better.  Sound like a lot of work?  It can be, but I’ve figured out to make it easy peasy and I’m sharing.  Just follow the steps below.

1. Set-up a free Tumblr account.  Call it [yourblogname]press.tumblr.com.
2. Choose your theme, I used the Silo theme and changed the background image.  However, you can keep it really simple.
3. Go to the Goodies tab in your dashboard and drag the “Share on Tumblr” bookmarklet button to your toolbar.
4. Staying on the Goodies page, you’ll also want to scroll down and grab the code to “embed your tumblelog”.  You’ll insert that code on your press & blog coverage page.  Check out my page as an example.
5. Set-up Google Alerts to send you any mentions of your blog name and your name across the web.  When you get an alert, click the link for the specific url to the mention and then just simply click that little bookmarklet button to add it to your Tumblr press page.  I also highly recommended doing a Google search of your blog name and name too so you can add any mentions from the past and have it all in one place.  It’s definitely worth the time.
6. Once my coverage reached the feed limit, I still wanted to give my readers access to older press and blog coverage, so I linked to the Tumblr page after the embed code for easy access.

So, if you didn’t already know this, you can now engage in shameless self-promotion on your blog or website.  But just remember, it’s not all about you.  Your loyal readers and your raving fans are the keys to your success so come back tomorrow to find out how to keep them happy and coming back for more.

YOUR HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT

Complete both of the tasks above:  create a bio page and a press page on your blog.  Then post it here in the comments section.  Today’s comment section will serve as a brag board for all the #15days participants, so today is not the day to be modest, people!

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