Photo by paintMonkey.

A ‘personal brand’ is in many ways synonymous with your reputation. It refers to the way other people see you. Are you a genius? An expert? Are you trustworthy? What do you represent? What do you stand for? What ideas and notions pop up as soon as someone hears your name?

If you’ve been around for a while you’ve probably already developed a personal brand. People recognize your name, what you’re working on, what you offer and what you’re about. That being said, your personal brand might be a little weak and disjointed. If you’d like to make it stronger, I’m going to help give you the tools by outlining what I believe to be the components of a strong personal brand.

If you don’t feel like you have a personal brand yet, this post will show you how to go about building one. But first, it might be worth talking a little about the value of your personal brand and why we might want to create one in the first place.

Read More…

Photo by ^riza^.

I had one of those days today where a few things coalesce to make you think about a particular topic. First was listening to John Gruber (DaringFireball.net) and Merlin Mann’s (43folders) SxSW talk on blogging. There are a lot of good tips buried in the talk if you don’t mind the two personalities, particularly on focusing on an obsession, adding value and differentiating your content. Most interestingly for me, they discussed the concept of an ‘ideal reader’ (which I’ve previously talked about as a ‘target audience’, but I like their term better!) This ideal reader is the person you would most want to enjoy your work. It could be another blogger you highly respect and admire, a friend, or another version of yourself. The key is that you’re crafting your work based around who you would most like to read it.

Read More…