Personal Branding – You2.0

Posted on 30. Mar, 2010 by Divya Uttam in Blog

We are in an amazing age. Today brands are everything, and everyone is figuring out how to transcend the narrow boundaries of their categories and become a brand surrounded by a Tommy Hilfiger-like buzz. Brand is what differentiates you from others.

Personal branding starts with “I” and “Me”. Others will come to know that you did remarkable things when you tell them about it. The first step to personal branding is getting your voice to a place from where people can hear you. As per the earliest notable mentions of personal branding-

“Starting today you are a brand.

You’re every bit as much a brand as Nike, Coke, Pepsi, or the Body Shop. To start thinking like your own favorite brand manager, ask yourself the same question the brand managers at Nike, Coke, Pepsi, or the Body Shop ask themselves: What is it that my product or service does that makes it different? Give yourself the traditional 15-words-or-less contest challenge. Take the time to write down your answer. And then take the time to read it. Several times.

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Book Review: The Social Media Marketing Book from O’Reily

Posted on 15. Feb, 2010 by Divya Uttam in Blog, Reviews

the social media marketing bookDan Zarrella with his book “The Social Media Marketing Book” introduces social media and guides on how best to use this media for the marketing of your business. Almost anyone can practice the workable solutions provided in the book, and make sense of the complicated social media environment.

For anybody who is new to social media marketing Zarrella introduces each basic building blocks of social media, including blogs; multi-media; microblogging; social networking; social news and bookmarking, in different sections. Within each section, Zarrella introduces a tool, talks about its history, and describes the protocols, features and functionality with the help of screenshots, graphs, and visual explanations.

The book is lean and with 224 pages of which half of them are screenshots and images, it is indeed a highly-tactical guide of significant value to any individual or organization looking to get into social media. The book also does a good job of showing the difference between different social media sites, such as pure networking (LinkedIn, Facebook), media sharing (YouTube, Flickr), blogs, microblogging, and bookmarking (Reddit, Delicious, Digg) and more.

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Blogging for beginners

Posted on 29. Sep, 2009 by Divya Uttam in How To Guides

Here is a small but useful checklist for all the beginner bloggers. The list has been divided into 4 stages.

Preparation

  • Fix a day to post – to be regular
  • Simple Keyword Research on the topic (One can use Google Keyword Tool)
  • Keep in mint the target audience of your post while deciding the topic
  • Check if the topic has been written before. Only write if you have something unique to say
  • Register your blog on Technorati.com, Blogcatalogue.com, Bloglines.com
  • Fix RSS feed with feedburner
  • Open accounts on Social News sites like Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, Furl

Writing the post

  • Keep in mind the point you want to make out of the post
  • Make the Blog Title attractive yet explainative
  • Try to use your primary keyword in the post
  • Use Positive Voice
  • Invite Comments at the end of the post. Leave enough for people to comment
  • Double check your links. Do not lead people to dead links.
  • If you quote somebody, give a link to the page you quoted from
  • Check the post for actionable insights
  • Double Checke Spelling and Grammar

Posting

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