Article first published as Are Professionals Ignoring Personal Branding Opportunities? on Technorati. No matter the industry, professionals across the globe must accept that one day, they may just be looking to leverage their own brand. Whether you’re looking for a new job, looking to move up within an organisation or simply looking for a pay-rise it is worth looking into building your own personal brand now. LinkedIn is the first and often the last profile that individuals create. It is a great tool to put your profile, experience, education and interests out there and engage with other like-minded individuals via professional groups. The latter is often overlooked in addition to the following opportunities. Blogging is the ideal form of personal branding as a host of blog posts gives a tremendous insight into an individual’s knowledge and position on topical issues. By publishing a successful blog an individual has the opportunity to lift their position within the industry, often sourcing speaking opportunities and it may just turn out to be a full-time business venture. A great example is Darren Rowse and Problogger. Twitter is not likely to allow you to make too much money (at this stage), solely from tweeting, but what it does do is allow you to learn from the best, network with the best and open up opportunities all over the globe that would not have presented themselves otherwise. Google is the most dominant search engine, we all know that, so it makes sense to create and complete a Google profile. In this case it is a Google+ profile, their venture into social media, tipped to surpass LinkedIn and Twitter. So sign-up complete your profile and link all of your other accounts. Quora is a Q&A social networking platform. It allows individuals to create a profile, follow topics of interest or personal knowledge and answer them when you like. The people that posed the questions and those following those questions will read your answer and vote, follow or connect with you. It’s a great way to establish your knowledge and again leverage other profiles. The beautiful thing about the online branding for professionals is that all of the above can be integrated, linking accounts, using some to promote others and so on. It should also be noted that one should approach it as a company/business would and perhaps identify keywords and continue to use these throughout your profiles. Personal branding is something that many of us ignore until it’s too late. So spend some time getting together some profiles and using them to leverage each other. You never know, the little effort might just come back to you in spades.
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