How to Optimize Your Personal Brand Online

Those of you who have been enjoying this series on creating the Perfect Personal Branding Strategy will know we’ve been talking a lot about being conscious of what content we share, finding our professional purpose, and ultimately improving your personal brand online.

While not super-practical, the more theoretical steps are designed to get you thinking about being more thoughtful and disciplined about how you present yourself both on/offline and improve digital presence.

How to optimize your personal brand online

Today I’m sharing a checklist of more actionable tips you can use to optimize your personal brand so you’re more discoverable, shareable and memorable:

Get a Professional Headshot

I’ve talked about this in a previous post, but no harm in giving you another nudge on this!

Label Files with Keywords

This is a basic requirement that is so often overlooked. For SEO (search engine optimization) purposes a file name can be an important factor in people being able to discover you. So when you get a new headshot or want to upload a PDF or word doc – ANYTHING – label it with keywords that people might use to search for you or your content.

All my photos are labeled mel-carson-delightful-communications.jpg which helps if people search for me or my company they see images related to me or my company in search engine results.

Update Your Social Profiles

Online profiles – especially on LinkedIn – should be seen as living testimonies to your professional life. An out of date presence on the web shows a certain amount of laziness in my opinion. So getting up to speed and being disciplined about refreshing content on your profiles is hugely important… you never know when someone is going to be looking for you or your expertise and needs to be impressed. You wouldn’t show up to work unkempt and casually out of date, so set aside time each month (at least) to go over your profiles and make sure the most current information and data is available for any potential connection.

Add Social Channels to All Touch Points

You’d be surprised how often I get out-of-office responders from people saying, “I’m out of the office until blah, blah, blah.” There are a few problems with that: They don’t say where they are or what they’re doing, they don’t leave their Twitter profile (for someone to click on and follow).

An out-of-office message provides an opportunity for you to leave someone with a good impression about your personal brand while you are busy with something else. It’s a win-win!

Out-of-office responders, email signatures, public presentations and business cards are all vehicles for your personal brand to hop aboard and be amplified through social signals.

Be Delightful

It goes without saying that in order for your audience/followers/fans to want to engage with you and whatever you have to say, you have to be authentic, useful, relevant and actionable.

The other tip I give people is that they need to be delightful. It’s not just our company brand name, it’s a word that brings with it a positive experience. The experience people have with your personal brand should be a stimulating and enjoyable one.

Whenever we embark on a personal branding analysis and strategy recommendation for our clients, there’s always a long list of tactics they need to consider becoming part of the daily DNA and routine.

In order to re-engineer your digital presence, I would say that these 5 are the pick of the bunch and ones you need to infuse into your pro-active personal brand from now on.

Remember to check back in a fortnight for the next installment in our series: How to Build a Personal Branding Strategy

And don’t forget to:

Check out our book now in paperback: Introduction to Personal Branding: 10 Steps Towards a New Professional You

Subscribe to The Personal Brand Lab

Follow @Delightful on Twitter

Like the Delightful Facebook Page

Join us on LinkedIn

Cheers,

@MelCarson – Founder of Delightful

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