Building Your Personal Brand Without A Blog 1 of 3

Building Your Personal Brand Without A Blog â€" 1 of 3 Over the last year as Ive enthusiastically evangelized blogging to build your personal brand, Ive had a number of you say that its too hard, too much work, too much of a commitment, etc. It doesnt help that you might be holding my blog as a goal or standard, which is not fair, because I blog as part of my business, and I know that many of you wont have the time or purpose that I have. I dont think Im anything amazing, but please dont consider my blog to be the example for what you should be doing. Instead of telling you to blog for your personal brand, how about if I share three other ideas that can have a significant impact on your personal brand? In todays world, with so many communication barriers removed, we can all take more control about spreading various messages, and the messages that we choose to spread will have an impact on how others come to know us the first tactic is to Write Articles This is the easiest, quickest tactic to employ. You dont need to commit to anything long-term, and can literally put out a great article in just a few hours (depending on how well you write). If you have any expertise in your field consider sending the article to one of your trade magazines (every magazine that Ive seen has a call for articles, and there are e-mail addresses in the magazine that you can ask for more information). If you dont feel that you have what it takes to write an article for the trade magazine, well, I disagree. Im sure you can figure something out if its not technical or topical, it could be an article on trends, which I understand is very popular. If nothing else, you can write about a career management issue (if you are reading this blog Im guessing you have your own list of 10 things that people should do for their job search, career management, network management, personal branding, etc. There are article submission sites that will shoot your article out to various publications. I have only used The Phantom Writers, but Mike Schaffner recently sent me a link to Ezine Articles. Im sure there are dozens of these types of services. Some are free, some you pay for. But just getting your article published once makes you a published author. Cool, eh? Tomorrow Ill talk about another tactic, and wrap it up on Monday. Have you ever written an article? Would you consider it? Update: Part II is here, Part III is here DiversityJobs.com has thousands of jobs from employers committed to diversity. Building Your Personal Brand Without A Blog â€" 1 of 3 Over the last year as Ive enthusiastically evangelized blogging to build your personal brand, Ive had a number of you say that its too hard, too much work, too much of a commitment, etc. It doesnt help that you might be holding my blog as a goal or standard, which is not fair, because I blog as part of my business, and I know that many of you wont have the time or purpose that I have. I dont think Im anything amazing, but please dont consider my blog to be the example for what you should be doing. Instead of telling you to blog for your personal brand, how about if I share three other ideas that can have a significant impact on your personal brand? In todays world, with so many communication barriers removed, we can all take more control about spreading various messages, and the messages that we choose to spread will have an impact on how others come to know us the first tactic is to Write Articles This is the easiest, quickest tactic to employ. You dont need to commit to anything long-term, and can literally put out a great article in just a few hours (depending on how well you write). If you have any expertise in your field consider sending the article to one of your trade magazines (every magazine that Ive seen has a call for articles, and there are e-mail addresses in the magazine that you can ask for more information). If you dont feel that you have what it takes to write an article for the trade magazine, well, I disagree. Im sure you can figure something out if its not technical or topical, it could be an article on trends, which I understand is very popular. If nothing else, you can write about a career management issue (if you are reading this blog Im guessing you have your own list of 10 things that people should do for their job search, career management, network management, personal branding, etc. There are article submission sites that will shoot your article out to various publications. I have only used The Phantom Writers, but Mike Schaffner recently sent me a link to Ezine Articles. Im sure there are dozens of these types of services. Some are free, some you pay for. But just getting your article published once makes you a published author. Cool, eh? Tomorrow Ill talk about another tactic, and wrap it up on Monday. Have you ever written an article? Would you consider it? Update: Part II is here, Part III is here DiversityJobs.com has thousands of jobs from employers committed to diversity. Building Your Personal Brand Without A Blog â€" 1 of 3 Over the last year as Ive enthusiastically evangelized blogging to build your personal brand, Ive had a number of you say that its too hard, too much work, too much of a commitment, etc. It doesnt help that you might be holding my blog as a goal or standard, which is not fair, because I blog as part of my business, and I know that many of you wont have the time or purpose that I have. I dont think Im anything amazing, but please dont consider my blog to be the example for what you should be doing. Instead of telling you to blog for your personal brand, how about if I share three other ideas that can have a significant impact on your personal brand? In todays world, with so many communication barriers removed, we can all take more control about spreading various messages, and the messages that we choose to spread will have an impact on how others come to know us the first tactic is to Write Articles This is the easiest, quickest tactic to employ. You dont need to commit to anything long-term, and can literally put out a great article in just a few hours (depending on how well you write). If you have any expertise in your field consider sending the article to one of your trade magazines (every magazine that Ive seen has a call for articles, and there are e-mail addresses in the magazine that you can ask for more information). If you dont feel that you have what it takes to write an article for the trade magazine, well, I disagree. Im sure you can figure something out if its not technical or topical, it could be an article on trends, which I understand is very popular. If nothing else, you can write about a career management issue (if you are reading this blog Im guessing you have your own list of 10 things that people should do for their job search, career management, network management, personal branding, etc. There are article submission sites that will shoot your article out to various publications. I have only used The Phantom Writers, but Mike Schaffner recently sent me a link to Ezine Articles. Im sure there are dozens of these types of services. Some are free, some you pay for. But just getting your article published once makes you a published author. Cool, eh? Tomorrow Ill talk about another tactic, and wrap it up on Monday. Have you ever written an article? Would you consider it? Update: Part II is here, Part III is here DiversityJobs.com has thousands of jobs from employers committed to diversity.

Is Your Brand Guilty by Association - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career

Is Your Brand Guilty by Association - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career I got in trouble quite a bit growing up, but not necessarily for misdeeds I had actually committed. My parents were firm believers in “guilty by association”â€"guilty for just being present when something went wrong. As social media becomes more ubiquitous, I bet your brand is in the same position I was all those years ago. Be careful who you friend Both Facebook and LinkedIn have privacy settings to control who sees your connections, but Twitter doesn’t. Although the ethics and legalities are still being debated, forty-five percent of employers reported in a recent  CareerBuilder  survey that they use social networking sites to research job candidates, a big jump from 22 percent last year. Another 11 percent plan to start using social networking sites for screening. As a hiring manager myself, let me tell you that it’s not enough to watch your own online behavior. You must also carefully monitor the behavior of your friends. Are they writing inappropriate content on your Facebook wall? Posting less-than-professional tagged pictures of you? Even though you didn’t put these items on the Internet yourself, they could still count against you. The lesson? Don’t friend anyone who might hurt your brand. Wisk away unwanted photos Last week, detergent brand Wisk introduced a Facebook app that allows you to send requests to friends who’ve posted photos you’d rather keep off the popular social network. Although the application cannotâ€"as the name impliesâ€"“wisk away” any photos without consent of the original poster, one would hope your friends would respect the request. If not, you might want to reconsider connecting with them in the first place. Create your own social media rules Many organizations are releasing guidelines about how their employees can engage on social networks during work hours. It might not be a bad idea to do the same for yourself. I actually have a strict rule about Facebook. I use it only to keep in touch with my family and really close friends whom I no longer live near. (If I don’t accept your request, it’s nothing personal!) On LinkedIn, I’m a bit more liberal. As long as the individual seeking to connect is someone in public relations or the career space, I will typically accept. (Although, custom invites certainly help assure a connection.) I use LinkedIn for a completely different purpose than Facebookâ€"mostly for connecting job candidates and employers. My Twitter strategy has changed several times since my first tweet in November 2008. I used to follow people back on a regular basis as long as they were job seekers, employers, university staff, public relations pros, or HR/career experts. But since being named to CareerBuilder/CNN’s “Top Job Tweeters,” I’ve had a hard time keeping up with demand. Now I follow back individuals who actively engage with me in an appropriate mannerâ€"and I’m not afraid to unfollow people for behaving badly. Every rule I set for myself on a social networking platform is an effort to maintain control over my personal brand. After all, if those looking to me are anything like my parents, my brand could become guilty simply because of association. What do you do to control the impact others have on your brand? Author: Heather R. Huhman is a career expert and founder president of Come Recommended, an exclusive online community connecting the best internship and entry-level job candidates with the best employers. She is also the national entry-level careers columnist for Examiner.com and blogs about career advice at HeatherHuhman.com.

3 Economic Principles You Can Apply to Your Life

3 Economic Principles You Can Apply to Your Life Time to rewind back to Economics 101. The beautiful topic of Economics is based on the principal of scarcity: we have a limited amount of time and resources available to us and must make choices of how to allocate what we DO have. In college, this means balancing the 3 S’s: Sleep, Studying and Socializing. Take a look at the following three principles and think about how you can apply them to your own life. Opportunity Cost This balancing act presents an opportunity cost: what you need to give up to attain what you want. For example, you can choose to study for an exam or go party with friends. If you choose to study, your opportunity cost is partying with friends. Opportunity costs do not always have a monetary value associated with them, rather, the cost is: anything of value to the person assessing the situation including energy and time. We are faced with many situations where evaluating opportunity cost can be very valuable. Here are some examples: -Should I go to grad school that costs $X,000 per year, or continue at my job making $X,000 per year? -Should I save that extra $100/month or put $100/month towards my high interest credit card debt? -Should I go out to a trendy new restaurant with friends, or stay in to work on my freelance projects? -Should I grow my side business, or put more hours in at my day job? -Should I stay at this job or should I find a new one? These are not questions that other people can answer for you. In order to make better decisions, you have to figure out what you value first. Perhaps easier said than done for most twentysomethings, when we are still in the stage of figuring out what we want and value. We are so accustomed to listening to our professors, parents and bosses. But, at some point we need to figure out what WE value and want for ourselves. Sunk Costs Sunk Costs are costs that are already incurred and cannot be changed regardless of what action we take. For example, a gym membership that you’ve never used or a car you’ve already purchased. A dangerous trap is the irrational thinking of “well, I’ve already put so much money and time into this so I might as well just keep going.” In many cases, this type of thinking leads to throwing “good money at a bad investment.” Instead, it is more economically rational to think of your decision going forward and leave your past expenditures out of it; your money and time are already gone. From there you can determine your values and use the principal of opportunity cost to make your decision. The Law of Diminishing Returns The law of diminishing returns states that if one factor of production is increased while the others remain constant, the overall returns will relatively decrease after a certain point. “For example, if more and more laborers are added to harvest a wheat field, at some point each additional laborer will add relatively less output than his predecessor did, simply because he has less and less of the fixed amount of land to work with.” (http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1E1-diminish.html) Here are some real life examples that might make more sense: -Eating your 4th hot dog brings you less satisfaction than your first or second did. -A drug addict needs more and more of a drug to feel the same pleasure he did from his first high to get the same effect. -An extra hour of studying at 2am is less productive than your 1st hour of studying at 9pm was. There are mathematic ways of calculating the point at which your action has less of an effect. The truth is, being aware of this basic principle should help you keep things in check in terms of spending money, buying too many new shoes, over eating, sleep, work etc. At some point the things you do in your daily life have a diminishing return.