Branding yourself, as an online character, isn’t all that easy. It can be done naturally, and in this case the line of least resistance is to be yourself, working with your favorite subjects, areas where you’re an expert with something to contribute. Do your work to the best of your ability, and you’ll suddenly find that you’re SEO material, a search term in your own right.

Branding and marketing

Whatever field you’re in, branding is a basic form of marketing, and to promote yourself you need pretty strong credentials online. This is the toughest, fussiest audience on Earth when it feels like it, and your brand has to be good to get any attention at all.

There’s a marketing principle called “The Four P’s” that’s particularly relevant to online branding:

The Four P’s are:

  • Product- What’s your product? What are people supposed to buy?
  • Price- Do you have a price range for your product, and what are your profit options, relative to the amount of time and effort you put in to your work?
  • Placement- How do you define the audience? Which particular group is likely to be interested in your product?
  • Promotion- What’s the best way to get attention and promote yourself, while addressing the other three P’s effectively?

This is considerably simpler than it looks. Online, your product is your content, in whatever form it takes. Your price is a value you place on your work, which can be tailored to meet both your needs and a realistic assessment of the price you’re likely to get for your work. The placement issue is a matter of targeting interest groups in your area of expertise. The promotion, therefore, has to be developed to appeal to the interest groups in those areas.

Branding and online culture

Every interest group online has its own culture. The IT people have their own language, the bloggers their own motifs and cultural mindsets, and the social sites have multiple versions of different cultures.

Interestingly, if you want an instant snapshot of any online culture, the social sites like Facebook are the best place to find it. You’ll find a menagerie of different levels of knowledge, different standards of presentation and often multiple types of group in the same culture on any subject, but you’ll also get an idea of the market for your brand.

This is a valuable experience, because the first thing you’ll notice is that each culture as different forms of brand for different identities. This is another marketing principle very much worth learning- The standouts are the successes, and the average brands are the failures. Being like everybody else is a recipe for failure, and a lot of wasted effort.

So- How to promote yourself?

The answer is simple enough:

1.    Be yourself, a clearly visible, different brand to anyone else.

2.    Make sure that your work is of a higher standard than anyone else’s, and be ultra competitive, providing better quality content.

3.    Learn Search Engine Optimization- It’s not a myth, it’s a valuable marketing tool, and can get you a lot of business.

Your brand is you. Nobody else can do that. Find your best and strongest skills and knowledge, and use them.