Psychology of Personal Branding

January 18th, 2010

Personal Branding
We’ve all heard about Personal Branding. It is your unique selling proposition that will differentiate you from all others. The great thing about Personal Branding is that you don’t have to pretend to be someone your not. In fact, it doesn’t have to perfect either. You will attract people as long as you are genuine in your message.

Psychology
There are a lot of psychological factors in play that cause people to be “Attracted” to you. I don’t mean strictly physical appearance here, though that can have a factor. If you can figure out what these psychological factors are and feature or accent your strong points and identify where you can improve in the others, you will be able to separate yourself from all the others. This may take a bit of introspection on your part. The number one reason people are attracted to someone else is that they feel that they are just like them for a host of reasons. They are looking to try to identify themselves with others.

Characteristics
What makes people identify themselves with others is different for everyone. It can be a combination of many things. It can be, and not limited to, age, gender, physical characteristics, experience, vocabulary, exuberance, and presence. It can differ from day to day as well. It depends on each person’s frame of mind. So no matter what your brand or what your strengths or weakness are, there will be someone who will connect with you, start following you, and start studying what you are doing. In a nutshell, you can’t be everything to everybody, nor should you try. You just need to be YOU. However, there are things that you should try to do though that will attract more than just a narrow band of people.

Your Voice
In your writing, your video, and communications you need to sound confident and sure of yourself. People are attracted to confidence, plain and simple. You need to be honest. If you need to write about a concept that you are not totally unsure of, let your readers know. By being honest and admitting some of your shortcomings people will feel an attraction because they know they are not perfect as well. You can divulge these with a pact to learn more about them and a promise then to write about what you learned. This will provide your readers with a sense of belonging while you discover together.

Where To Go From Here
Personal branding isn’t something that occurs right from the get go. It is something that evolves. You will need to take the time to learn to write better. We all do. What’s the best way? By writing of course. You also will need to read the writing of others, especially successful writers and bloggers. Try and see how they frame their ideas and concepts. Try and isolate how they involve their readers and try to start incorporating those concepts into your own writing. I know I tend to write more in an expository manner and it can become a little dry at times. So these little tips, which actually aren’t so little, will provide you with the means to create a Personal Brand that will shine above the rest.

Just Say No – Stopping Stress In Your Life

December 22nd, 2009

Well I’m continuing my series on reducing or stopping the stress in your life. Today, I’m talking about saying, NO. I remember an old movie back in the 70′s called “Silent Movie“. It was made in 1976 by Mel Brooks. It was a silent movie except there was one spoken word in the whole movie by of all people Marcel Marceau. He said “NO!”.

I’m saying this because for some reason we are almost conditioned to always say yes, OK, or ya. After all, you want to go along to get along. You don’t want to appear inferior, do you. So when someone asks you if you can do something, the obvious response is typically, OK. You can always find a way to squeeze it into your schedule somehow, right? Well you may be a superman or superwomen but squeezing too many things into your schedule becomes downright stressful.

You need to learn to say NO. You need to simply say you don’t have the capacity to take on an extra chore. You need to prioritize each of the things you are asked to do, sometimes self imposed as well, and ask yourself if there are more important things to do. So when declining an offer you need to make sure you are firm. If necessary, let the person making the request know that you can’t fit it into your schedule. If you start to feel guilty, offer to do something else or to take on the task later in the week once your week is a little less hectic.

It is plain and simple. Do what’s important for you. Remember, some of the small items you do have, See “Git Er Done – Stopping Stress Your Life“, you should knock off right away. Then by not committing to things that directly benefit you, things should start being less stressful. Tomorrow, I’ll talk about number 3, exercising.

Learn Without Memorizing

October 13th, 2009

Part of being an entrepreneur involves having to where many hats. If you’ve been studying using social media for your marketing there are a lot of things to remember. In the context of having to be as efficient as possible through daily habits, there are many things we have to remember that matter greatly. While no single task involved with it is extremely difficult, having to remember them all can be challenging, especially when literally the next day you may be teaching someone else what you just learned today.

With that I offer you a blog post called How to Learn Without Memorizing written by Scott Young on a Blog site called Think Simple Now. In it he describes a completely different system of learning by connecting ideas together. Scott describes this as creative learning.

What I’d like to advocate in this article is a more creative, spontaneous form of learning than the style you were probably coached for in school. Instead of repeatedly scanning the same information for minimal benefit, invest your time learning in creating connections with the information you are learning. Not only is it a more natural way to learn, it isn’t painfully boring like most memorization tasks are.

He goes on to describe many different strategies that you can implement as well. I find this kind of learning fascinating and will certainly delve more into it. I may even try and use it to try and explain some abstract technical information. Don’t be surprised if you find it in one of my later 101 traffic generation strategies in the near future.

Not only is this post interesting but the whole blog seems to be as well. Again it’s called Think Simple Now.

Have a remarkable day.

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Vilfredo Pareto

June 29th, 2009

When starting an internet business one of the things that I think we all struggled with to some extent, is where to spend the majority of our time. There were so many things that we had to figure out. We had products or opportunities, market demographics, determining niches, marketing strategies, auto-responders, capture pages, sales pages, web sites, blogs, social media, fulfillment, phones, fax, etc… to worry about. Then to make things worse, while doing research to find information and recommendations on all of those things, we ended up finding that there are a thousand other choices we had to make. We started wondering if it is all worth it and saw other opportunities that somehow seemed a little bit easier than what our original choice had been. Bottom line, it’s was and still is easy to get distracted.

Another factor that we end up with is having to deal with the 80-20 rule otherwise known as the Pareto Principal. Vilfredo Pareto was an Italian economist who observed that 80% of the land was owned by 20% of the population. This later was expanded and is true for many things. A popular business axiom is that 80% of our sales come from 20% of the business. The one we (especially new entrepreneurs) have to worry about is that we ended up spending 80% of our time on things that don’t contribute to the bottom line. We need to concentrate on the 20% and refine it as much as possible. So how do we go about that?

The first things that that we need to do is prioritize our tasks and spend 80% of our time on the top 20% of that pile. I literally used to have a boss who taught me to take my “in basket”, back when email wasn’t as prevalent, sort it by importance with the most important on top and work from the top. There were items that never got attended to. The people requesting things figured out where to get their answers from someone else or they did their own research. The long term consequences were that people started relying on me for important items because I gave them the attention they needed and the minutia of the daily grind went somewhere else. I ended up getting higher visibility in management’s eyes, got noticed and was handsomely rewarded come review time.

You can do the same thing managing your own business. You may not have the luxury of ridding yourself of the daily minutia, but you can automate it, pay someone to automate it, pay someone to deal with it, or even, getting rid of it altogether. You need to be spending as much time as possible on those actions that give you 80% of your income. You need to outsource or automate as many routine or mundane tasks that you have to perform. By practicing these principals and understanding Pareto’s Law, the bottom line on your balance sheet at the end of the year will reward you.