Personal Branding: How to Create a Digital Footprint
The past few months have forced us to rely on technology to conduct business — cue the hundreds of emails and Zoom conference links flooding our inboxes. Since the Internet is now the place to be, digital personal branding is more important than ever. In the virtual wilderness that is the Internet, it’s easy to get lost. Here are 5 Tips that will well-establish your digital footprint, and make you stand out among your peers.
Take Assessment of Your Online Presence
Before you can create a powerful digital brand, you need to evaluate where you stand. A reverse search on yourself should give you enough of an idea: are you locatable? There may be a person with the same name, but a far greater online presence — thereby shoving your search results to the bottom of the page. Finding your online bounds will give you an idea of where you land in this endlessly growing digital landscape.
Curate a Personal Narrative
The next question to ask yourself: what do you want people to know about you? The answer will be integral to your personal brand. Begin cultivating content that helps you to tell your story in the most authentic way. One of the easiest ways to distribute information about highlights in your life is through press releases. Marquis Who’s Who stays in constant contact with their listees to learn about board appointments, career moves and new initiatives, then creates content that is distributed to search engines and picked up by industry specific media outlets. With so much information at our fingertips, short attention spans make it necessary to continuously add fresh and updated content online, so remember to upload new content every quarter.
Own Your Domain Name
Creating a personal website is a powerful way to control and tell your story, but the first step in website building is buying your domain. You would be surprised that many professionals have websites dedicated to their corporation, but they have never secured their own .coms. Most domain registration companies charge less than $10 a year for this service. Even if you are not ready to create your personal website, simply purchase your name and park it until you have the time to devote to your website presence. This will save you frustration and funds in the future when domain poachers try to sell your name back to you for thousands of dollars.
Build a Personal Website
I always tell listees to be personable — but professional — when cultivating their brand. Creating a personal website with a blog feature is one of the most fruitful ways to do this. Viewers of your page can therefore get more insight as to who you are as a person, beyond merely your basic services and biography. Your website is the hub of your narrative, services, and brand. You can aggregate content that you have written, press releases, articles, awards, images and features all in one centralized place. Including a blog can focus on your skill set and occupation, but it could also pertain to your interests, hobbies, and accentuate your voice. For busy professionals who don’t have time to manage their on websites, Marquis Who’s Who offers web hosting, content writing and maintenance services for their listees
Videos are Your Best Friend
As everyone is sick of reading email after email, article after article, short videos are a welcome change of pace. Adding webinar software and hosting webinars, Zooms, and video biographies to your online presence gives the audience the ability to witness how you carry yourself and engage with others. For Marquis Who’s Who listees, we pursue such videos with our celebrity interviewer Star Jones. She hosts recorded interviews to reveal the “behind the scenes” of some of the company’s most inspiring individuals. I have found that people are engaging with video links more than ever before; videos are simply more compelling, and a unique facet to the typical hum-drum of a website’s written content.
This guest post was authored by Erica Lee
Erica , the first female CEO of Marquis Who’s Who, has pioneered the more-than-a-century-old flagship print registry into the modern world by pivoting the company into the digital branding space. Each biographical reference guide contains hundreds of “listees,” the most influential and distinguished individuals in their respective fields. Erica has brought her listees off the pages and into the online spotlight; fortunately, she has shared her secrets with us — because we all need to curate our personal brand.
