Hi everyone, my name is Chad Levitt, and I’m the newest member of the Personal Branding Blog team. My posts will run here every Saturday and I’m looking forward to hearing all of your thoughts and responding to your comments.
For my first post, I wanted to share with you my story on how I got here, and the incredible opportunities that have come my way from promoting my personal brand. This will help all of you to get to know me and show you how essential it is to begin building your own personal brand, if you want to succeed in a very different, digital world.
A big realization about my personal brand
The first time I read the Personal Branding blog about 7 months ago something clicked.
What clicked?
I realized my personal brand online sucked! For some people that would not have been a problem. But, for myself, it was a monstrous problem.
Why?
Well, I had some big goals and I realized they stood a much greater chance of coming true, much quicker, if I began to build my own personal brand and share it with the world. And that’s exactly what I’ve done in just 7 short months.
When I first got started building my personal brand, I was already a part of Linkedin, Facebook and a newbie to Twitter. I had already used Linkedin to land my top job choice without even applying to the company. I had experimented with blogging on Blogger because I thought it was a cool way to share my thoughts. I had some experience, but I was still in the kiddie pool with my floaties on, because I hadn’t created anything of my own yet.
Creating my personal brand
That all changed when I launched the New Sales Economy blog on January 1st, 2009 and started sharing my thoughts on Sales 2.0 & Social Media with the world.
It was one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life. I now had a virtual marketplace to share my thoughts and build a community. People in the sales and marketing industry could now find me online. And they did.
The rewards of creating my personal brand
After 2 months had passed, I woke up one morning to an e-mail from Jeb Blount, the CEO and founder of SalesGravy.com. The e-mail was an offer to take over the SalesGravy.com featured Sales 2.0 blog. This was big. SalesGravy.com is the leading web portal and community for sales pros, with over 100,000 unique visitors, 350,000 visits, and 2,500,000 page views per month. Inevitably some proportion of this community will be exposed to my writing and personal brand. It will help to build my audience and thought leadership in my niche/tribe.
I’ve also interviewed thought leaders from different fields on how they use Sales 2.0 & Social Media to connect, create more opportunities, and increase their business. I’ve interviewed Neil Patel, Jill Konrath, Nigel Edelshain, Jim Fowler, Mike Volpe, Zack Miller, Anneke Seley, and Dan Schawbel. I’ve got some more big names on the way!
With each blog post I write, the interviews I do, and each tweet I send out I’m promoting my personal brand to the world and staking my virtual ground in the search engines. Nobody can ever take that away from me. I own it. And my presence grows stronger every day.
Then came another slam dunk opportunity. It was an e-mail from Dan Schawbel, that he sent to his network/tribe, with an offer to be a contributing author for the Personal Branding blog. I immediately replied and Dan decided to go with me because he had experienced my personal brand from my blog, our mutual social networks and the interview I did with him. And now your reading my first blog post here.
The key takeaways from my story are simple
You need to develop your personal brand and you need to do it now. Don’t wait! In 7 short months my personal brand online has grown from virtually non-existent to prominent. It will continue to grow in the future. With some hard work, learning, and passion you can do the same!
