Your Personal Brand Online: With About.me

In times today keeping your updated is important, also on the list of important things is keeping others updated about you. Especially to explore and build upon global opportunities professionally, you need to be actively communicating and reaching out to relevant people.

Branding and positioning for SMEs: the challenge
Its not just about branding your business, its about positioning yourself as well. For any emerging enterprise much of the business that it initially does comes through the professional relationships which its founding or the core team shares with the world outside. The professional relationships help in gathering the initial momentum which is needed to launch and position your product/ service/ offering in the market.

For SMEs the challenge is to find innovative ways of positioning themselves, as for them marketing by investing into major offline media is rarely an option during early days of business.

Personal branding: yes it works!
In many cases, especially for Small and Medium Enterprises, the initial business comes in based upon the strength, powerful positioning and solid proven experience of the core team and other team members. The core team of any emerging company must be positioned across well online. Your personal impression creates an impression of your company's/ business in the mind of your target audience.

How should I brand myself online?
Personal branding is as critically driven an exercise as is the branding for your business. There are some critical factors that you must keep in mind:

• Convey your message in short and sweet words
• While creating your profile on any networking website, try keeping your 'username' the same as the name with which you want to position yourself: eg: if I want the world to know me as ABC, I will take facebook.com/profiles/abc, Linkedin.com/in/abc, twitter.com/abc etc. This will also ensure that overtime search engines also get to know that I am ABC
• Keep all your online profiles updated at all times

Is there some platform where I can express myself once and whoever wants to connect they can!

You must have a profile on About.me! Yes that's the website. Not really a social network, About.me essentially is like an attractive looking HTML "About Me" page online. It allows you to create a creative profile of your own and share it with the world.

How is it different from other social networks?

About.me is not really a social network. Its simply a platform where you can express yourself in anyway you like the world to know about you and if it  interests people, they can connect with you on the rest of the social networks (aka: facebook, Linkedin) etc.

How do I access About.me?

Its simple. Login to About.me, it will take you about 5 minutes to be ready with your profile for the world to see. You can share links to your other social network profiles which you feel are good to be made public.

Not just that, About.me also shares with you statistics in the form of how many people visited your profile, average time spent on the profile etc.

Advantages of a powerful personal profile!

While SMEs will appreciate the advantages of a powerful personal brand, the advantages of being on an open network where people are expressing and sharing about themselves is that you can establish a relationship and connect with them while exploring various opportunities. A personal connect and a reference always works better when generating business/ exploring opportunities. And here you are connecting with people globally.

To know more about how you can create a powerful personal brand online and leverage open global networking to your personal and business advantage, drop in a comment to this post and our team of experts at IndiaMART Knowledge Services will be happy to help!