Personal branding | Best Practices
What happens when you enter your name into Google? Do you come up number one? If not, are you on the first page? And if you do appear, is it something valuable? Or is the listing a photo of you as attending your ten-year high school graduation party (or worse)?
You need to be found on Google. Personal branding is essential in today's world.
1) If you're looking for a job, potential employers will search your name.
2) If you're a lawyer, consultant, or real estate broker, your clients will search your name.
3) If you're a salesperson, your potential customers will search your name.
4) If you're single, potential significant others will search your name.
There are several strategies to make the first page.
If you have a unique name, congratulations, you will be found. If you don't, and your name is something shared by many people like "David Scott," you could use your middle name professionally like I do. When you make yourself unique, you own the results for your name.
You can blog prolifically and post other valuable information on the Web like my friend Chris Brogan and rise in the search results.
Or you can get a Google profile.
I wrote about Google Profiles a few weeks ago, but since then there have been some enhancements that effect how your profile appears.
Your Google profile can now be a simple URL using your Google ID. Mine is google.com/profiles/davidmeermanscott. This makes it easy to remember and share.
Google now shows Google profile results at the bottom of U.S. name-query search pages. These results offer abbreviated information from user-created Google profiles and a link to the full profiles. Read more about it on the Google blog.
Even if you already appear in the search results for your name, you should have a Google profile and keep it up to date.
Stop what you’re doing and create or update your Google profile now.
