I love the internet, I love branding, and I of course love myself! The internet is a crucial component to the contemporary entrepreneur’s personal branding efforts. I suggest that you adopt these loves as well for the following reasons…

Opinions are valuable. Do you want to completely leave other people’s opinions of what type of person you are and what you are all about up to their crazy imaginations? I don’t. I want people to know the truth.

The truth is that I am important and someone people should know. The truth is that I am an extremely capable man out to massively contribute to the world in a very positive way. The truth is that I am a solid investment. The truth is that I am honest and have unwavering integrity. The truth is that I am not just another talker. I am taking extreme action on a level just as extreme as my ultimate vision. But when I walk into a room of people, do they know all of this or am I just another average person to them in their minds?

I don’t want other people dreaming up my personal brand for me. I want to control my own brand and let the truth out. An effective brand comes down to marketing and alignment between brand and the actual product. In this case the product is you!

Since launching brianwatkins.com on the first second of the 2006 New Year, I’ve had tens of thousands of people visit my personal website and learn about me. I’ve only told a few hundred people about myself in person during the same time. There is no question that the internet provides a lot of leverage for making yourself known to a lot of people.

How do you specifically build a personal brand and how do you use the internet to market it? I could probably write a volume of books to answer that, but let me give you a high impact condensed version…

Define Yourself

If you were selling a unique computer, such as the OQO handtop, would you hire a marketing team and say “Okay guys, all you need to know is that I am selling a computer. Now go build the brand and show me what you’ve got when you’re done.” This business owner would be out of business fast. Sadly, so many people say the same thing when describing themselves. They say things like “I’m just your average college student who likes playing sports and having fun.”

Don’t fall into this identity trap! You are much more interesting than that! You won’t be able to build a compelling and elaborate personal brand if that is how you view yourself. Explore who you are. What do you stand for? What do you love? What do you want? What about you is unique? What is your mission in life? Ask high quality questions about yourself so your brain will feed you back very good answers. The answers you find will become a pillar to your branding efforts. Record and organize as much information about yourself as you can. You will be able to draw from this self-knowledge to build your brand much more effectively, not to mention that knowing yourself better can help you have a more successful and happy life.

Brand Intentions

With anything, you have to know the outcome you want. What are you intending your personal brand to do for you? It may be that you want to find like-minded people to build friendships with. Maybe you want to gain users for your new Web 2.0 venture. It may be that you are looking to attract investors for a company you are building. Maybe you want to spread your philanthropic mission throughout the world. Become clear with yourself on what goals of yours that you are putting your personal brand to work on. You can have just one or several intentions for your personal brand.

Title

I believe there is a lot of marketing power in summing things up in a few words or less. Usually the first thing advertisers will tweak is the headline of an ad. For your personal brand, your personal title is your headline. The title that I came up with for myself is Extreme Entrepreneur. It describes me well, it sounds good, it looks good, and it feels good. Now a good percentage of people who know me will often use this title to identify me and describe me. It sets me apart from other people, it makes people remember me, they know what I do, and I instantly become more than a name by identifying myself as Brian Watkins the Extreme Entrepreneur. Doctors have long been enjoying the benefits of having a title along with their name. Why shouldn’t you?

Homepage

Today, the internet’s content is primarily delivered through websites. With websites being so cheap to create and maintain, I suggest owning your own personal website to promote your personal brand. Using other people’s websites to host your own content is a less professional and less significant way to showcase yourself. You are a very valuable asset to yourself so why not display your personal brand in a professional way? Buy a good domain name for your personal brand. This may be your own name as it is with brianwatkins.com, mine. It may be your personal title or some other good name. Have a good design made and resist putting other people’s ads on your website that liquidate your personal brand equity. Now you get to refer people to the 24/7 personally branded marketing vehicle that is your personal website.

Themes

To add power and emotional connection to yourself, your content and your marketing materials, develop one or multiple themes for your brand. A good way to come up with these themes is to sum up the brand with defining words, look examples in the world of things that trigger your various senses that align with these words, then assemble multiple components into a theme which helps people experience the feelings for your brand that drive them to fulfill your intentions. Your themes may include subjects, words, symbols, sounds, visuals, etc. I believe consistency is a big factor in making a theme add value to your personal brand. A major theme component for your personal internet marketing efforts is the design of your personal website.

Multimedia

The use of multimedia will always increase throughout time along with the increase in technological innovation. Multimedia is a great way to invoke a heightened emotional response from your audience as well as increase their understanding of your brand. Consider using multiple forms of media such as pictures, sound, and video to get your message out into the world. I personally am planning to use podcasts, IPTV shows, and movies to push my personal brand further with multimedia.

Promotion

It does you no good to establish a personal brand if you don’t expose people to it. You should take the number of people that directly interact with you and multiply that by a large number for how many people should be interacting with your personal brand. For major celebrities, this multiple could be over a million! My multiple is at about 100 right now. For every one person I directly interact with, my personal brand is interacting with a little over one hundred people. You want your personal brand out there working for you without the need of your personal time.

Promote your personal brand by utilizing several marketing channels, especially internet, and brand as many things as you can that make sense. Some ideas may be to hand out business cards, tell people you meet about your website, link to your website in your emails, send press releases to news outlets, befriend influencers to create positive word of mouth, do something newsworthy, optimize your website for search engines, give speeches to groups, give out free promotional products with your website printed on them, post in message boards, create a MySpace page, be a guest on a TV show, get interviewed by individuals with websites, write articles, etc. Get out there and promote yourself so your personal brand can get some love!

Continuous Content

If you create your personal brand and keep continuously releasing the same content & marketing to the world, you might do a great job in getting people to come and check you out initially. However, that is not enough to keep people coming back who like you. You need to continuously keep putting more personally branded content out to your audience to keep people coming back. A great place to distribute this content is through your personal website.

If you don’t think that you can find information to present and publish consistently throughout your life, you are wrong. You are what is called a human being. By default there are so many interesting thoughts, experiences, feelings, philosophies, actions that are a part of your life. Just tune in your senses to these things and you will begin to consistently find content. There are many people that you don’t know yet who want you to publish this stuff to them. Go for it! Get people hooked on you!

Relationships

The world runs on people. If you are trying to achieve something in the world then odds are that you heavily rely on people in some way. Build strategic relationships with others to help you get to where you want to go. Maybe the relationship is the end goal for you. Maybe it is a stepping stone. Don’t be greedy, win-win works best in my experience. Look for synergy in relationships. Your personal brand will help you create a lot of successful relationships that you never would have had without it. I say this from personal experience.

Polarization

Don’t be afraid to polarize people. This means do not be afraid of making a few enemies to make a lot of people love you. Even if you live your life in the most ideal way that you can imagine, there will still be people who hate you. It is because they have a psychology of hatred. All you have to do with these people is feel sorry for them and keep on living your life in the way you know is best. Focus on all of the positive people who are raving fans of you and your brand. Many times, very successful brands capture extreme opposites in emotion from people. Just make sure the ratio of quantity is in the favor of your brand’s intention.

Alignment

A very powerful characteristic of an elaborate brand is alignment throughout the brand. With your personal brand I recommend making sure that the truth of your identity & self align with your brand intentions, which should align with your brand’s core essence, which should align with your brand’s feel to people, which should align with the individual bits used to construct the public parts of your brand.

For example a personal brand in alignment might be… A person who loves making people laugh has the intention for her personal brand to make people feel like a kid again. So she markets herself and brand as a carefree person who loves people, is always smiling and telling jokes. People feel happy and in a playful mood when around her or her personal brand. Finally, she decides to wear her hair in pigtails, she tells stories about having fun as a kid, she sticks smiley face stickers on people she meets with her website address on them, and on her party themed website she has a weekly comedy podcast.

That is personal branding in alignment. Have some fun and try to unalign this personal brand as an exercise.

Multi-Branding

You are one person but are you limited to having just one personal brand? No! In fact, I am in the process of developing my second personal brand right now. This new personal brand, that I am releasing later this year, is going to be a child brand to my parent brand of Extreme Entrepreneur. My reason for creating this secondary brand is because I have a specific goal that I want to produce a very extreme amount of results with in a small amount of time. My current personal brand of Extreme Entrepreneur won’t be in full alignment with this venture but it is still great for the longer-term in my life. Therefore, two personal brands are now appropriate for me. I am even building a separate website from brianwatkins.com, with the domain name as my brand title of course, just to keep needed separation between the two and to create more alignment in my new personal brand.

Multi-Branding can be tougher to pull off successfully. You need to make sure that all of your personal brands fit together and that any possible risk brand dilution is worth it.

Take advantage of your creativity, my strategies, and technology to build & market your own personal brand. You already have a personal brand but you may be letting other people control it. Take back this power for yourself and make your truth known.