The 5 Steps to Branding You

The Internet can be a great place to find people who share the same passion as you, people who may be interested in the business, product or service that you offer. How can these people find you? Through Personal Branding …

What is Branding?

Whatever business, product or service you are promoting, you need to get it in front of people. You rely on people in order to make money in your business. And if you don’t yet have a business, well the best way to build one is from a responsive list of contacts.

In order to create a responsive list of contacts, you need a place where people can learn more about you, your passions and your business. You need a place where you share your experiences and your skills.

Branding you on the Internet is all about creating an environment where people can get to know, like and trust you. When someone gets to know like and trust you, they will buy from you and become repeat customers and loyal members.

How does one go about creating a brand online?

The 5 Steps of Creating a Personal Brand

There are basically 5 steps needed to create your personal brand. As with any setup, each step in itself may contain many smaller steps. The 5 main steps to branding you are

Registering a Domain Name
Hosting Your Domain and Installing WordPress
Setting up a professional auto-responder and subscriber optin form
Writing posts and recording videos
Getting Traffic

Let’s start with talking about registering a domain name.

Step 1. Your Domain Name

It’s important that you register a domain name that has your name in it such as janedoe.com. If your name is a common name, such as Jane Doe, then you may need to consider adding a hyphen jane-doe.com or getting creating with things like whoisjanedoe.com and janedoeonline.com. By now, you are getting the picture.

The important thing here is that the domain includes your name.

You can purchase domains and an reliable Domain Registry such as GoDaddy or eNom Central or Name cheap to name a few.

When you register your .com domain name, you are simply buying the name. Now you need someplace to ‘host’ your domain.

Step 2. Hosting Your Domain

Hosting your domain is something you need to think about before jumping in. You want to make sure to use a reliable Host Provider. There are several popular ones, HostGator comes to mind as the most popular and affordable host.

Our recommendation is GVO / HostThenProfit (HTP). GVO (Global Virtual Oppotunities) offers solutions from $9.97 per month with HTP to $44.95 a month for the full Titanium Package with GVO.

At HostThenProfit, for $9.97 per month, you receive hosting for up to 4 domains, a professional auto-responder with up to 5 campaigns and 500 subscribers, video hosting for up to 5 videos (commercial free) and a small video conference room perfect for small meetings.

 

Setting up your new domain and installing a WordPress blog is simple and we offer full instructions for the GVO installation. Most hosting companies offer video training (as does GVO), so setup is very simple and common at most hosts.

Setting up your Domain with a WordPress blog will take anywhere from 5 to 60 minutes depending on your experience.

Don’t spend too much time selecting themes at this point, download a few and pick one that feels good, it’s fairly simple to change the theme down the road.

We want to get the entire blog working so we can start using it to build those relationships 🙂

Step 3. Setup Your Auto-Responder and Optin Form

Regardless of what business you are promoting, you need to be building your list and you NEED a professional auto-responder. In Step 2. we discussed GVO and HostThenProfit, both services offer a professional auto-responder. Other great options include GetResponse, AWeber and TrafficWave. There are many others, those are the top 4 (including GVO).

 

Setting up your Auto-responder is fairly straight forward and involves setting up a campaign or list, setting up some followup messages and creating an optin form.

Initially, all you need is a simple followup email to reply to your subscriber once they confirm their email address. Normally this initial email includes a link to a free report along with your contact information.

Each auto-responder is a bit different and very similar and they all offer simple steps on how to setup your list. The importance here is getting this setup and your Optin Form on your blog.

The Optin Form normally is placed as a Text Widget in the Side bar. It is recommended that the form be right at the top of the side bar (the first thing your visitor sees on the right or left (right is preferred)

Remember, there will be plenty of time to pretty up your new blog and add your profile information, About page, etc. Let’s get the basics done so we can have someplace to start telling our story and sharing our passion.

Step 4. Writing Posts and Recording Videos

Yes, video … you CAN record your own videos, it’s easier than you think and so is writing blog posts.

People get afraid of writing blog posts thinking they need to be award winning authors, when that is just not true.

All you need is something to write about … so here are some ideas …

Write about your experience as you experience it here online … your first post can be about your experience installing your own domain and setting up your fist blog!

Write about your passion … what excites your, your hobbies. People are interested in what you do and who you are and the more you share about your passion and your experience, the more you will attract people who like what they read … people who will subscribe to your list and become long term repeat customers and business builders.

Write about the webinars you attend. If you attend training webinars and learn useful information, come and write about it on your blog. People are interested to hear what other people learn. If you apply what you learn, share your results. I do encourage you to ALWAYS apply what you learn 🙂

That should be enough to get you going. Your post does not have to be long, 3 or 4 paragraphs are plenty. Once your post is written, you will not want to record a video to add.

Recording a Video is simpler than it looks. All you are going to do is introduce your blog post. So let’s say you wrote a blog post about the Webinar you attended on the 5 Steps to Brand you and from that webinar you learned the importance of taking action. Your video script may look like this:

Hello and welcome to my website. My name is YOURNAME and today, I want to share with you a post I wrote about a webinar I recently attended where I learned all about the 5 Steps to Brand yourself and the importance of Taking action. I hope you enjoy my post and encourage you leave your comments. If you aren’t already subscribed to my list, you’ll find the form on this page, be sure to signup for my free report. Thanks and have a great day.

With script in hand, you press Record on your Webcam and read the script. Practice it a few times first – the more natural you can sound the better.

 

If you decided to go with GVO/HTP, you will be able to upload your video to the Easy Video Producer area OR you can upload it to Youtube. Once uploaded, you will be able to create an embed code that you will paste into your blog post at the top of the post.

And that’s it, you have created your first WordPress blog and written your first post and recorded your first video. Congratulations … now we need to get traffic to your blog.

Getting Traffic To Your Webiste

There are many ways to get traffic to your blog. You can us Traffic Exchanges (yes they work) and even Safelists. We talked recently on one of our webinars about how effective it is to send an email to a Safelist or Credit List and ask members to comment on your blog. While there, they may subscribe to your list if you are offering something of value OR if they like your post!

Social Networks are a great place to get people to read your blog posts. You can get involved in groups and share with members, you can ask your friends to read and comment. Using Social Networks to share your blogs creates a strong bond between you and your Facebook friends as they begin to see the value you are offering rather than prospecting them directly for your business.

Another way to get traffic to your blog is through article marketing. With article marketing, you can write an article on a topic and then direct your readers to your blog to read the topic in more detail. Article marketing can be fun and profitable.

And that’s all there is to Branding You. Remember, your blog is like your “home”. It’s where visitors get to know, like and trust you. This creates long term customers and repeat buyers and will attract the right people to your business. Keep it real, keep it about your experiences and your passion and watch how your business grows.

Enjoy the Recorded Webinar on 5 Steps to Branding You with Janet & Don Legere

Happy Branding!

Janet Legere
The Contact List Builder