By Hasnain Zaheer
Personal online marketing
Connectivity is the 21st century electricity, data centres are the new rail tracks, and targeted advertising platforms such as Google AdWords are the new engines that pull our intentions, needs and wants and haul them across to businesses.
In this hyper-connected, hyper-competitive world, how you are seen and perceived in your own professional world is fast becoming an essential ingredient to survive, not just to thrive.
Personal marketing is not vanity. Rather, it makes pure business sense to create and nurture a brand of ‘You’. Furthermore, just like in product markets, ‘you’ as a brand would be more highly valued and compensated as compared to ‘you’ as a commodity who is trading skills and time for monthly wages.
Personal marketing has been of great interest to me for years. I felt there was a gap in material, resources and guides on personal marketing available on the Web. While channels of promotion are covered in most available resources, there was little material on building a strategy that preceded promotion.
I believe that the strategic thinking in the beginning of a new marketing project is the most important phase. That was the blueprint I was missing whenever I reviewed any resource on personal online marketing.
In this guide, I have tried to fill that gap. This material should help you connect your strengths, passions and interests and link them to market opportunities in identifying your market segment and positioning yourself as a professional.
So, before you write your first blog post, register in your first social network and speak at the first conference, read this guide to draw a blueprint for your success.
Summary of this e-book
Why personal marketing and branding?
Marketing yourself is essentially planning, communicating and highlighting your personal strengths, knowledge, skills, competencies, achievements and the benefits that you can provide for employers, clients, employees and other stakeholders, for their benefit and success, and of yours in such a way that your messages are closely matched to the needs of the audience and have taken into consideration your objectives from prospective relationships.
Building blocks of a personal marketing strategy
Clarify the 4Ps of marketing – Product, Place, price and promotion. Assuming yourself to be a product in the employment or business market, answer:
What are the essential features and benefits of myself as a product;
Where am I located or willing to locate;
What are my objectives in terms of compensation or profit expectations from business; and
What channels of communication am I using currently to promote.
In other words, what are my strengths, weaknesses, interests, passions and expectations?
Identify opportunities: Identify a niche or a market segment that you would like to own after carefully matching your insights from the 4Ps to the opportunities that you have identified in the market.
Ensure that the identified area is small enough for you to build a reputation in a reasonable period – 1-3 years. Draw boundaries in your area by defining it in terms of geography, functional area, vertical, product or market;
The identified area may often be the same as the business or market that you have been engaged in for years.
If the identified area is different from your existing occupation, assess if you have the resources necessary to re-orient yourself to a new area such as by investing in training. You may have to go through a learning curve in the new area or climb the career ladder all over again.
If you are a student or a fresh professional or want to change careers, ensure that the area offers long term opportunities and your assets, capabilities and strengths are well-suited to it.
Determine your positioning: What specific aspect in the chosen area would you specialise in, where would you operate (geographical area) and what would be your promise to your future employers, employees, business partners; and finally
Finalise your marketing objectives and targets
Execute your strategy with focused content and promotion programmes
Build online content that establishes you as a thought leader. Build a professional blog and gradually upgrade it into a professional Web site. Aim for the Web site to be eventually considered a comprehensive resource in your niche.
Syndicate your content. Be a guest blogger. Write for magazines, journals and make yourself available for long-running columns.
Publish newsletter regularly following best practices in building mailing lists and promote your newsletter.
Use a limited number of social networking platforms in a targeted way to build a quality network of colleagues, competitors and followers.
Use social networks in conjunction with content sharing – books, articles, bookmarks, audio, video, presentations and other media.
Speak frequently at conferences
Publish a book.
Read the full text to know more about the strategy, execution and resources on personal online marketing.
Full text
Personal online marketing for career & business growth
Introduction
Marketing is conventionally associated with a business, not a person. Branding is generally understood to be something that you do to your business or to products, not to yourself.
No longer! In the hyper-competitive, hyper-capitalist, highly-connected world of today, job security and rewards are not proportional to years of loyal service. It becomes your responsibility, as a professional or business-owner, to take care of the brand of ‘You’.
Take personal responsibility for how you are seen in your professional world. Personal marketing is fast becoming an essential ingredient to survive, not just to thrive.
If you are seen as a leading expert, you’d not only escape retrenchment in tough times but command a premium in your compensation, get higher billing rates in your consulting and publishers line up to promote your content – whether books, blogs or articles.
It’s not vanity
Is personal marketing self-indulging? Is it vanity? Or even arrogance? Many people associate it with giving too much importance to self!
I don’t think so. Today, it is essential to survive. When you are doing personal marketing, you are not indulging self, you are trying to survive in a world that appreciates individual excellence, a world which has so many excellent, well-educated people that you need to stand out to be noticed.
Personal branding is hard work and it’s essential that you believe in its effectiveness before you read the rest of the book and build and execute a personal branding strategy.
So what is personal marketing all about?
Marketing yourself is essentially planning, communicating and highlighting your personal strengths, knowledge, skills, competencies, achievements and the benefits that you can provide for employers, clients, employees and other stakeholders, for their benefit and success, and of yours in such a way that your messages are closely matched to the needs of the audience and have taken into consideration your objectives from prospective relationships.
In today’s employment and consulting markets, you are effectively an independent provider of your professional services. Unless you market it properly with the right positioning, you’d not be valued as highly as you deserve.
Personal branding is about how you can build a long term reputation as an industry expert, be a sought-after writer and/or speaker, command new streams of income, make potential business partners yearn to associate with you, and get better pay and rewards in your current job.
Personal branding can be about how one is known to be a successful and effective enterprise builder, one who attracts the best talent, attracts capital because of a reputation of excellent business acumen, and communicates effectively at all levels.
The choice is yours
Would you like to remain a commodity? Or would you like to become a brand – a brand of you?
As in the product markets, you as a brand would be more highly valued and compensated for, rather than as a commodity trading your skills and time for monthly wages.
The audience of you as a product may be your employers, potential business partners, and investors in the organisations you work for.
But before you go to market, you must have your goals (personal, career or business) clear in your mind, and have done a realistic assessment of your knowledge and skills inventory.
Building blocks of personal marketing
Clarify your 4Ps of marketing – product, place, price, and promotion
In most discussions of online marketing, we typically focus on only one P: promotion, and list out the channels and methods of promotion. However, it is essential that we work out the first three Ps first.
Product
Look within and answer these questions to find out what you can offer to potential employers, customers, students or clients:
As a product, what are your key personality attributes that can benefit a customer?
What knowledge, skills, experience, personal qualities and strengths place you in a position to benefit them?
What motivates you?
What do you enjoy doing?
Which combination of roles and domains work best for you?
Are you an individual worker or a team player?
Do you have a realistic knowledge about your strengths and weaknesses? A personal SWOT (Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis is required.
Use assessment tests to determine your strengths:
– Gallup’s Strengthsfinder 2.0 provides you an easy, inexpensive and insightful method to know your strengths, read description of how you can put your strengths to work and how to work with other people having similar or other strengths. You only need to buy the book that has an assessment code, take the assessment, view results and analysis and apply the insights. More details on Strengthsfinder 2.0 (http://www.hasnainzaheer.com/2008/11/strengthsfinder/).
– Use other assessment methods such as Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) or Hermann Brain Dominance Instrument
Price
Listen to yourself on your ambitions, aspirations and goals:
What are your expectations from yourself today? In 5 years? In 10 years?
What do you want to earn in your job or business in terms of monetary and non-monetary rewards? When? How much rewards do you want to reap from consulting, writing, analysing, speaking? How much do you want your business be worth?
Are you currently earning / valued at these levels?
Think about what your compensation is going to be when you reach the peak of your potential and what are you willing to give up to achieve it?
Place
Think about the flexibility or limitations of your choice of geographical location?
Can you move to a client’s location or a new employer located at the other end of the country? The other end of the globe?
Do you want to avoid working online? Are you a telephone person? An online geek?
Does your current location offer enough business or employment opportunities in your identified field of work?
How much time do you have time to build a personal brand? Access to respources?
Promotion
Determine which promotion tools may work best for you:
Does your strengths pre-dispose you to be a good speaker, a writer, blogger, an analyst, a commentator, leader or a service provider in the industry?
We would discuss the methods and tools of promotion to build a personal brand in detail later. Right now, our aim is to get you to think about all the components that go into building a great marketing strategy.
Identify a niche market segment
A review of 4Ps will help you in connecting your strengths, interests and experience to market opportunities in order to effectively choose your niche.
What do we mean by this? You need to choose a market segment in which:
you have expertise
enjoy working in
you can build and draw upon your strengths
you have a good opportunity to grow by having (relative to other segments) low competition from other experts
there is sufficient volume and growth.
If you are already established
For an established professional or a niche business owner, the choice is simple. They’d choose the business they are in. In these cases, while you surely have the experience, you need to assess if the niche presents enough opportunities in the long terms to capitalise on.
Is the niche worth being recognised as an expert in? Is it large enough to afford you a career full of achievements? Is it so large that dozens of experts are competing for attention?
There may be cases where you may have the experience in a particular market segment but your strengths were probably never suited for it. Or you never enjoyed doing it? If it was originally a bad career decision, you need not continue with it. On the contrary, this may be an opportunity to change your career by choosing a niche that is more suited to your strengths, aptitude and interests.
Whether you change your industry / vertical completely or only change the nature of what you do, success depends on how closely aligned are your strengths and competencies with your chosen area.
Let’s take a few examples:
Charlene Li (http://www.charleneli.com/) was a vice president and principal analyst at research firm Forrester before she relied upon her knowledge and experience in social and emerging technologies to became a celebrated author of Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1422125009?ie=UTF8&tag=hasnzahe-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1422125009) and a speaker, adviser and consultant on digital strategy. She capitalised on her expertise and reputation to carve a leading role for herself.
Rajeev Karwal (http://www.milagrow.in/rajeevkarwal) was a corporate marketing manager of consumer durables companies such as Philips for much of his career. He is the founder of Milagrow (http://www.milagrow.in), a small and medium business (SMB) consulting company and now writes and consults extensively on SMB sector. He has successfully made the transition from corporate marketing and branding to SMB strategy.
Let me cite my own example. I worked in financial markets for about 4 years before I changed my area to online marketing back in 2000. I was trained in finance, was seemingly doing well in it with successful projects and growth and this career could have continued to provide me a satisfying career and a comfortable lifestyle for years. But I was missing a passion to do something that really drew on my strengths of creative strategy. And this led me to change my career.
Po Bronson has interestingly documented how people changed their life and careers
mid-way in his book – What Should I Do with My Life?: The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question. Read more details about this book or buy at Amazon.
New professionals
Choosing a niche may present a challenge to a new professional or a career changer. As they are inexperienced, they should start with choosing a narrow segment, populated by less competitors but which has the scope to expand later.
As I have several student readers, I have them in mind when I say that you must build a personal brand in a small way right from the day when you graduate. Although it would be hard to build credibility at that stage, being considered an expert in a narrow niche from a relatively young stage will help you expand your profile and offerings later.
You may dissect the market into as many pieces to select one that is a good fit. For example, online marketing at a global scope is probably too big a category with hundreds of recognised experts. But you can limit it to your home country and choose only one channel out of several – say, e-mail marketing. So, as a newbie personal marketer, you shifted your ambitions from a seemingly impossible ‘global online marketing expert’ to a ‘UK e-mail marketing expert’. The classic ‘big fish in a small pond’ philosophy works beautifully for new professionals.
Determine positioning
After you have identified a niche segment, think about the things you’d like to do: think, speak, write, train, consult or work. What are the qualities required to do each of these types of work and whether your analysis of your 4Ps place you in a favourable position to excel and recognised in the industry for it. Again, depending on your strengths, interests and goals, you may choose to be a strategist, speaker, writer, trainer or a consultant.
More information on positioning: Here is an article on positioning your personal brand and covers five tests for your personal brand.
All the above analysis will help you execute your strategy of building your own personal brand.
Examples
Here are examples of great personal brands with comments on their industry and positioning.
Whether and how much they worked on their personal marketing is besides the point. What is important is that they built it with excellence in their work and a passion in what they do.
Building a brand consciously may just speed up the process but unless you have or are willing to have an inventory of achievements in a well defined niche, plus strengths passion and interest for that niche, you may not achieve it. Here is a list of a few of achievers who also have a great brand value:
Global
Name
Theme or industry
Products, companies and content
Steve Jobs
Product design and marketing
iPod, iPhone, iMac and other Apple products. Twitter (http://twitter.com/SteveJobs)
Seth Godin
Permission marketing
Seth’s Blog (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/), Unleashing the ideavirus ebook (http://www.sethgodin.com/ideavirus/) and many other books
Guy Kawasaki
Entrepreneurship
Early stage venture capital firm – Garage Technology Ventures (http://www.garage.com), Art of the Start, Reality Check, and other books
Robert Scoble
Technology
Popular blog (http://www.scobleizer.com)
Thomas Friedman
Globalisation and outsourcing
Columnist, author and journalist http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/. Recent book – Hot, flat and crowded, most popular book – The World is Flat.
Nicholas Negroponte
Digital future
Columnist, founder of MIT Media Labs (http://www.media.mit.edu/) and currently working on One Laptop Per Child (http://www.laptop.org/en/)
Jakob Nielsen
Usability
Author and consultant (http://www.useit.com)
Gerry McGovern
Content management
Author and consultant (http://www.gerrymcgovern.com)
Darren Rowse
Professional blogging
Blogger (http://www.problogger.net)
Australian
Name
Industry or domain
Products, content and Web sites
Mike Walsh
New media
Consultant, author and speaker
(http://blog.mike-walsh.com/)
Brad Howarth
Digital media
Columnist, speaker and writer (http://lagrangepoint.typepad.com/)
Peter Switzer
Personal finance and entrepreneurship
Business coach, publisher and financial planner (http://www.switzer.com.au)
Indian
Name
Industry or domain
Products, content and Web sites
MJ Akbar
Political journalism
Founder ((http://www.mjakbar.org)) of several newspapers and media based on outstanding political and investigative journalism – The Telegraph. Asian Age and now Covert (http://www.covert.co.in)
Tarun Tejpal
Investigative journalism
Founder of Tehelka that has several pieces of outstanding journalism
Rajeev Karwal
Small business services
Consulting in starting up, scaling up and turning around small and medium enterprises (http://www.milagrow.in)
Finalise marketing objectives and targets
After a SWOT analysis, identifying your niche, positioning yourself after a review of your strengths, aptitude, interest (and passions) and matching them to opportunities, you are now ready to frame your objectives and finally, targets to shoot for.
Your objectives should not be more than 2-3 lines long, that spell out what you want to achieve in the defined market and area of work. As an example of a personal marketing objective:
X would like to be one of the top three experts and thought leaders in UK in the area of social media marketing strategy with a reputation for outstanding consulting practice that delivers value for money.This would be accomplished by achieving the following targets:
Create and maintain a popular blog that attracts the highest number of visitors in the category of social media marketing blogs in UK within one year.
Syndicated writing in at least 3 national level or popular media
Regular contact with the top 10 marketing experts in UK, and another 10-15 globally.
Create a comprehensive Linkedin profile and build at least 500 connections of people who are other social media experts, potential clients, and other marketers including marketing students.
Create and nurture a Linkedin group that can be used as a platform for discussions.
Write a book on this subject in about 2 years and achieve sales of at least 5000 copies.
It may be sound a lot but you can build a less ambitious list of targets if you have lesser time.
Executing your strategy
You can use a few or several of the following tactics to achieve your targets:
Build online content that establishes you as a thought leader
Create content for your online professional presence. You may create and regularly update a blog. A few key points in professional blogging are:
Host it on your own domain like http://www.yourname.com.
Choose a good hosting service such as WP Engine.
Take help in design: Blogs are effectively content management systems that are easy to configure. WordPress has thousands of themes and plug-ins that extend its functionality and most are easy to install. However, unless you are a design expert, take help from an experienced designer. You can satisfy your hands-on instinct by doing the installation, choosing a theme, basic customisation, and hire the blog designer to give finishing touches.
Maintain a steady pace of posting. Don’t let your blog die.
Market your blog yourself or with the help of online marketing service providers.
Ensure SEO for your keywords and key phrases, write meta-tags for all your pages and posts and submit in directories.
Comment on other blogs in your area and interact with other bloggers. Tell other bloggers and authority figures in your industry about your blog, your key articles and ask them to review and link them.
Always include your blog URL and social network URLs in your signatures.
You can gradually expand your blog to a personal Web site with a detailed profile, links to content published under your by-line in other media, books, speeches in video and audio and highlights of other achievements. Host a discussion forum.
Syndicate your content
Publish your articles in offline and online resources such as industry Web sites, magazines, journals and blogs (as a guest blogger on others’ blogs). Media is always looking for specialists to provide the unique insights and specialist commentary that only industry professionals can provide.
Ask to be a guest writer or blogger directly. You can discuss regular column opportunities after the first article is published. Ask to meet the editor.
Many small business owners frequent Web sites of their local Government agencies, and small business portals and writing for them may get you a good stream of consulting leads.
Submit your articles on article Web sites. Make your brand so visible that people cannot avoid seeing you.
Publish a newsletter
Publish a regular newsletter. A few pointers:
Use a professional e-mail service provider (ESP)
Always send it to those who have given permission to receive your e-mails. Respect people’s time and aversion to spam.
Host a subscription invitation on your Web sites and mention it in your profiles. Build a strong, relevant mailing list by promoting the newsletter.
Announce a frequency and schedule and stick to it. Don’t send them too many or too few e-mails.
Have a conversation, not an impersonal broadcast.
Make it easy to read and store your e-mails, offer a RSS feed.
Use designer’s services to build a great but usable design and maintain a consistent branding.
Social networking
Social networking is one of the most important tools to build a personal brand. Social networking services are online communities of people who share similar interests and who want to connect, communicate, share information and their passions in business, professional or personal life (such as hobbies and interests) with others.
In essence, social networks provide you a platform on which you can build a profile that may advertise your interests or achievements and let others read and contact you. But you might say, a simple Web page containing your profile and an e-mail address can be good enough to achieve this! So what’s so special about social networking?
It goes much beyond an online profile
A social network goes much beyond publishing your profile. It hosts profiles of thousands or in some cases, even millions of other profiles. Information in the profiles such as their schools, colleges, universities, companies, cities, interests, hobbies and professions are used by the system to recommend who you may like to connect with. A messaging system lets you invite others to join your network and receive similar invitations. It also lets you send messages to people in your network. You may use this facility to ask a question or share information of common interest with people in your network.
A social network helps us carry on social interaction – meeting new people as well as maintaining relationships – online. It can help extend your offline or physical world’s social life and add a new dimension to it by letting you engage with people from other places and with those with whom you have lost touch.
A note about privacy: Many social networks address the issues of privacy by letting users decide what parts of their profile can be open to others. So, you can display only the information you want to, to the world.
Professional Groups
There’s more. You can join or build a group focussed on a particular topic. Linkedin, Facebook and Zaabiz provide the facility to create a group in a few clicks. As the initiator or moderator of a group, you’d enjoy the respect of group members. Creating and promoting a group is a project in itself and you must follow it up to increase its membership and make it an important meeting point for everyone involved in your niche.
You can search for jobs or post jobs. You can advertise on a social network to access clearly segmented groups of people who can be your job post’s or advertisement’s audience. You may organise events to bring the online social activity out into the open.
Use social networks for their benefits, not to waste time
Social networks frequently cop the criticism of being time-wasters. For a good reason – It’s exciting to look up and connect with old or former classmates, colleagues and relatives, and exchange inane messages reliving old times and pursuing conversations without a purpose.
Like any other tool, a social network can be a great servant and a poor master. On one hand, you can use it to solicit job and business opportunities and connect with potential employees, partners or vendors. On the other hand, you can use it to pursue meaningless conversations.
Fortunately, as you have already defined a market, positioning and objectives, your usage of social networks will be focused. You will seek out the right people to connect with and you will ask the right questions and share the right information with others.
A few best practices to use social networking effectively
Ensure that your profile and messages are professional, respectful to readers and the language, tone and text match the profile of your network. Social networking for personal and social purposes can be great to connect with friends and relatives. Social networking for business is productive and beneficial and can be deliver great ROI for your time.
Be an active networker. Don’t just fill out the profile and let it ‘sleep’ online. An outdated profile and just a handful of connections may demonstrate that you may have a habit of starting and abandoning projects.
Embellish your profile with well-written, positive recommendations from relevant and highly placed colleagues and professionals.
Highlight your education but more importantly mention continuing education such as refresher courses, books, newsletters, bookmarks, reading that you normally do.
Complete social profiles with photos, education and interests. Experiences must not be job descriptions but achievements.
Active business networkers have an excellent online profile including a photo, past experience, “haves” (skills), “wants” and interests. They use online networking as their online business card, which introduces them effectively to others. They join and create groups and connect with others who have common interests. They also start inviting other business contacts to join them on ZaaBiz so they can network together. Active networkers quickly create their own micro-networks by daily involvement, persistence and dedication. Online networking for active networkers is smart business practice. Successful business networkers make online business networking an active part of their daily business routine, anything less is time wasting.
Global networks
The most popular global social network services are Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin.
Linkedin is a specialist professional network and can host your complete resume with companies worked in, education, recommendations from co-workers, photo and also enable you to join and participate in groups and forums, get updates of others in your network, and share posts from your blog, use applications such as Reading Lists on Amazon, Slideshare presentations to share your books and presentations in your linkedin profile.
Sharing bookmarks, photos, videos, podcasts and presentations
The rise of universal search, reputation based ranking methods such as PageRank and social media implies that your blogs and social networks cannot exist in isolation. Use sharing tools effectively and ensure that your content in blogs and articles use multiple media.
Q&A, discussion forums, mailing lists and groups
Participate in forums of Web sites in your industry. For example, developers and designers of Web applications use the famed discussion forums on SitePoint.
Yahoogroups and other mailing lists and discussion boards enable you to search for groups and mailing lists in your industry and in your geographical area.
Offline / Physical world marketing channels
Networking services
Services such as Nationwide Networking helps you attend events related to your field or of homogenous groups such as small business owners for a fee. These services typically have an annual fee and/or admission fee for each event.
Speak in conferences
Contact event production companies and offer to speak at their events. Your Web wide authority building articles that establish your thought leadership will help you position as a credible speaker in industry events.
For a new professional, it may be tough but you will have a better chance to be invited if you agree to forgo your fees for speaking and / or your travelling expenses.
Publish a book
After you have built a solid expert profile, it’s time to seal your success with a book. A book used to be a massive enterprise a few years back with innumerable submissions of manuscript, meetings with editors and iterations for changes. While some things have not changed, the process has been made easier because of the office technologies. It is now easier to pitch to and collaborate with your publishers and editors.
Self-publishing options have removed the frustration of endless rejections. These services not only publish your book remotely but also help distribute it.
Helpful resources
Strategy
Books
Principles of Marketing by Philip Kotler.
Me 2.0: Build a powerful brand to achieve career success by Dan Schwabel. More details at the book’s website or buy at Amazon
Service providers
Branding personality (http://www.brandingpersonality.com/) run by Marieke Hensel
Reach Communications (http://www.reachcc.com/)
Brand resolve (http://www.brandresolve.com/)
Articles
Time magazine article with cases and stories (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1552028,00.html)
Business week article with cases and stories (http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/nov2004/sb20041118_2262_sb017.htm)
10 ways personal branding can save you from getting fired – Mashable (http://mashable.com/2008/12/10/personal-branding-in-recession/)
Successful branding and recognition tips – 5thirtyOne
(http://5thirtyone.com/archives/818)
Build a personal brand with social media content franchises – Micropersuasion (http://www.micropersuasion.com/2008/12/build-your-pe-1.html)
Beginner tutorial on how to market yourself – eHow
http://www.ehow.com/how_4481722_market-yourself-online.html?ref=fuel&utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=ssp&utm_campaign=yssp_art
A humourous take: The difference between marketing, PR, advertisng and personal branding (http://www.quicksprout.com/2007/10/24/the-difference-between-marketing-pr-advertising-and-personal-branding/)
40 key elements to getting started in social media – Louis Gray (http://www.louisgray.com/live/2009/01/40-key-elements-to-getting-started-in.html)
Ben Angel’s article on how tpo develop your personal brand
(https://mybrc.com.au/Attracting-Business/Buy-Sell/Selling Points/Pages/Develop_Your_Personal_Brand.aspx)
Professional blogging
WordPress
Australian business content Web sites
Cr8biz (http://www.cr8biz.com.au)
EBC (http://www.ebc.com.au)
Flying Solo (http://www.flyingsolo.com.au)
Yahoo! Small Business (http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com.au)
Smart Company (http://www.smartcompany.com.au)
Article submission Web sites
EzineArticles (http://www.ezinearticles.com/)
GoArticles (http://www.goarticles.com/)
Article Trader(http;//www.articletrader.com)
Articles Factory (http://www.articlesfactory.com/)
E-mail service providers
iContact (http://www.icontact.com)
MailChimp (http://www.mailchimp.com)
Constant Contact (http://www.constantcontact.com)
Social networks
Linkedin (http://www.linkedin.com)
Facebook (http://www.facebook.com)
Twitter (http://www.twitter.com.au)
Zaabiz (http://www.zaabiz.com.au)
Naymz (http://www.naymz.com)
Economist story on professional social networking: Facebook for Suits (http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12304861)
Content sharing
Bookmarks: Digg (http://www.digg.com), Delicious (http://del.icio.us), Technorati (http://www.technorati.com)
Video: Youtube (http://www.youtube.com)
Audio: Podcast Network (http://www.podcastnetwork.com)
Presentations: SlideShare (http://www.slideshare.com)
Networking
Nationwide Networking (http://www.nationwidenetworking.com.au)
Clever Business Networks (http://www.cleverbusinessnetworks.com.au)
Connect (http://www.connectmarketing.com.au/html/s01_home/home.asp)
Self-publishing of books
Self Publishing service (http://www.selfpublishing.com/)
Self-publishing service in Australia (http://www.selfpublish.com.au/book_publishing-where_do_I_start.html)
Resources on traditional publishing (http://www.bookpros.com/index.php)
Article on self-publishing (http://www.spacejock.com.au/SelfPublishing.html)
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Please share your own ideas, notes and experiences in building a personal online brand in comments or contact us with your comments.
About the author
Hasnain Zaheer is a Director in Simplogy. He is a Certified Practicing Marketer (CPM), Associate Member of Australian Marketing Institute (AM AMI), holds a Masters in Management (Macquarie Graduate School of Management), qualified Google AdWords Advanced and Reporting & Analysis Professional, and certified in training and assessments among other qualifications.
He leads digital strategy and digital led business transformation practice at Simplogy and helps organisations build great digital products, eliminate risks from digital projects, and build capacity and capability in digital teams with coaching, training and workshops. Learn more or contact him.