The reason for the questions above is because I come across so many people who don’t really know who they are and as a result are not really doing themselves any favours when it comes to putting a profile together.   So where do you start?  Well, you could start with the present.  The reason for this is because it is the present that matters when it comes to a personal brand, of course what you have done in the past and the vast amount of experience you have had matters a huge amount, but it matters because it informs the present.  In other words, you probably wouldn’t be doing what you are doing now without having gone through your past experiences, even if you jumped ship into a completely different career.

How this translates online means that your summary reflects your CURRENT STATE – the things you are interested in, what motivates you, what drives you, your goals, dreams and aspiration NOW.  It also should reflect the successes you have already achieved as well as those you are hoping to achieve in the short to medium term.

Don’t forget those all important key words too, you know the ones that reflect the expertise you have, that you draw on everyday in order to undertake the role you now have  …. At the same time don’t dismiss your past experience, just because it was a different career path, it has never been truer than today to say that all of your experience is relevant, but only in context of how it is used now.

Once you realise that LinkedIn is not just another online CV storage facility, but a real, live thriving community that can help you to achieve your goals you’ll start to value the person you are today, and not the person you were five, ten or even twenty years ago.  It is the present that matters, but your present is built on the experiences of your past!

LinkedIn Made Easy, the ebook that accompanies this website, is full of hints and tips to help you make the most of the opportunity that is the LinkedIn community, you can buy it now, for just £4.99.

As you have probably guessed by now, LinkedIn can be used for many different purposes, the main one of which is Personal Brand Building (in my opinion of course!).  There are however, so many conflicting opinions on how to go about the task of personal branding, and my take on it is just one of many, that I thought a post listing some of the key blogs in this area might be of use to readers.

Personal Branding Blog was started by Dan Schawbel in 2007 and has been providing advice, suggestions and a regular magazine ever since.   Dan’s mission is to teach you how to create your career, command your future, learn how to position yourself for success and in the process become known for your passion and expertise.  In my opinion, one of the best personal branding blogs around!  Just as a matter of interest, if you do a search on Google for Personal Branding blogs, Dan’s blog returns no less than six of the listed organic results, rather like the results I get for LinkedIn Made Easy!

The Personal Branding Blog’s first post was an short comment on personal googling – AKA using google to search for yourself – you should try it sometime, it’s fun .  Since then William Aruda has demonstrated with passion, everything you need to consider when you are taking a peek at using personal branding to build your career and lifestyle.  Use it with caution though, it can be addictive and I can spend hours just surfing around for interesting snippets of information.

Rob Cuesta’s ‘The Business Growth Blog‘ began life in January 2007 and has grown ever since.  791 links in and an Alexa ranking of around 49,000 mean that Rob is a key man to watch.  What he says matters, what he doesn’t say is often even more important.  Note the comments he makes about Networking (in the traditional sense that is) and his comparison to Schrodingers cat – those that know me well will know that I’m interested in this sort of thing.

The final figures on Day 30 of the challenge are:

• Number of books sold – 187 (just under 6 books per day)
• Money Raised for charity – £374
• Amount paid to affiliates – £83
• Costs of processing the sales – £99.36
• Total amount to go to The Hysterectomy Association – £459.77

These bald figures though, don’t reflect the other ’successes’ that the challenge has had which include meeting my objective of ‘proving’ that social networking works for all businesses regardless of their starting point.  The social networks proved to be the greatest source of activity on the website and consequently sales and it would be fair to say that almost everyone that actually visited the LinkedIn Made Easy sales page on this site bought the book – according to Google Analytics there were 94 unique visitors to the page and 82 books were sold through it – this is an amazing return on investment.

I also have so many people to thank and will do so over the course of the next few weeks by writing about them on the blog.  Once again, it was links from the social networks, blog posts and twitter that were responsible for most of the visits to that book page.

As a result I’m going to keep the challenge going – I want to raise £400,000 for charity but now I’m not putting a time limit on it.  I will continue to write on this blog, I’ll continue to keep people posted and I will continue to donate £2 from every book sold to either Kiva or the BCCT.  In the coming weeks I’ll be reporting on where the money has gone to and how it is going to be used as well.  The reason I’m focusing on these two charities is because the other two that I would have liked to support didn’t bother to come back to me at all.

In today’s harsh world of business everything has to be consistent otherwise you can create an unprofessional image of someone only playing at things.  Your website, web address and email address should all be related to your business card, business name and any other marketing material you may be producing.  This is equally true on the social networks like LinkedIn where your professional persona is even more important, because this is where you talk about YOU in relation to your business rather than your business in relation to you.

So if you too have yahoo!, gmail or msn email address, go have a chat with your website developer and ask him to make sure your email address is consistent with the image you are hoping to convey.

So, what exactly do you do in this situation?  I thought I’d have a quick trawl around the web to see if I could come up with a list of suggestions that other people make as well as see if I can add some of my own in addition.  I came up with FOUR key points to bear in mind.

1.  Think carefully about the message – mine was “social media and recruitment survey – win a bottle of champagne” and it went on to say that one could win a bottle of France’s finest champagne just for taking part in the survey.  On reflection, I’m not entirely sure that this was the right way to go about encouraging people to complete what is actually a very serious piece of research in business use of social media for recruitment.

2. Think about where you post it.  I could have chosen to post it as a discussion, but my own feeling was that this is a piece of news, a bit like a newspaper headline.  At least as news you get the chance to ignore it if you don’t want to read it and it is quite clearly marked as going to another website for more info.

3. Think about the audience.  I’m a member of quite a few groups on LinkedIn and as I worked my way down the list I was surprised to find myself questioning whether a group was the right audience for this particular news item.  As a result I avoided some groups entirely and on others checked the type of news items posted previously, BEFORE I made my own contribution.

4. Think about who YOU are.  As a trainer and business development consultant on social media, it behoves me to act in a way that is consistent with what I tell my clients to do.  It also requires me to analyse my own behaviour fairly frequently simply because things and cultures change in groups.  I am sure that there will be one or two groups where my news item might be seen as spam; I’m equally sure that as a result I will receive a message or two informing me of this.  The problem is that I don’t yet know which groups that might apply to and as a result am flying blind.  What will happen though, is that I will change my behaviour in the future, because that’s the nature of learning I guess.

But what exactly is a ‘personal brand’?  According to Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales, personal branding “is the process whereby people and their careers are marked as brands”.

So just how do you build a personal brand? It’s about being consistent in everything you do.  From the profile that you post on LinkedIn or Facebook, to the email address you use, the presentations you give, the skills you demonstrate in your work.  I’m constantly amazed by the number of professionals that give an email address of x@gmail.com (unless of course they work for Google).

Over the next few weeks I’ll explore how you can use LinkedIn to build a personal brand that has integrity as well as the ability to transform your business and your career.

One of the most important things to remember though is to ensure that you do send a personalised request to connect, rather than the canned message that are built into the system.  There are many reasons for doing this but the most important is to demonstrate that you have  very good reason for making the request in the first place and that you aren’t simply in a numbers game.

Status Update for LinkedIn Made Easy – 30 Day Challenge

• The total number of books sold – 176
• The number of books sold online – 185
• The number of books sold directly to people instead of online – 9
• The amount of money raised for charity – £370
• The amount paid out to affiliates too – £83.00
• The number of LinkedIn connections I have – 440
• Some basic website statisticss, such as number of visitors and pages viewed – Visitors – 941, Pages Viewed – 5390
• Number of links from Google search for LinkedIn Made Easy – 6/10 – not bad at all!

My headline/baby bio read “Social Entrepreneur, Internet Mentor, Speaker, Writer, Diva, Blogger & Founder of The Hysterectomy Association”. I’m not entirely sure that it’s the DIVA that gets the attention, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised

1. To edit your profile, click on Profile in the top navigation bar
2. This defaults to the edit pane
3. Click on the little ‘edit’ button next to the headline and make your changes in the box marked ‘Professional Headline’.  Don’t forget to hit SAVE and you’re done
4. If you are stuck for something to say, why not have a look at what others in your industry say in theirs!