With July 4th behind us, this week is the perfect time to review your progress achieving your 2013 personal brand building goals and progress.
Evaluation plays an important role in any sound branding strategy; it provides an opportunity to monitor your progress and make changes where appropriate.
Here are some questions to ask yourself as you review your progress:
- Social media. Have you been diligent about providing your followers with a constant stream of helpful, relevant content? How often have you posted new content to your blog? How many blog and newsletter subscribers have you added since the first of the year?
- Editorial calendar. Have you updated your 2013 editorial calendar for the second half of the year, reviewing and fine-tuning your topic choices on the basis of the lessons you’ve learned during the first half of the year, as well as recent trends?
- Website signups. How long has it been since you posted a new white paper sign-up incentive or video? When was the last time you objectively reviewed the landing page for your signup, testing it against a different offer, headline, or layout?
- Learning. What’s the last online marketing or personal branding book or ebook you read? How long has it been since you attended a conference, teleseminar, or webinar describing the latest trends in content, social media, or personal branding?
- Content recycling. How frequently do you review your previous articles, blog posts, and podcasts, looking for ideas you can reuse, recycle, or expand. How long is it since you prepared a blog post calling attention to earlier blog posts your current followers may not have seen? What are some of the ways you can compile your most important earlier ideas into a “best of” ebook?
- New media. Have you begun expanding your social media presence using up-and-coming tools like Pinterest or SlideShare? Both make it easier to visually communicate your brand building expertise. Both integrate easily with your blog and existing social media.
- Planning. Are you finding is easier to plan your personal brand building, using the latest versions of mind mapping tools like Mindjet that let you add Start and Due Dates to your projects. You can also create a dashboard to manage your personal branding tasks as well as track good ideas for future use.
Writing and personal branding success
Most important, has writing become easier for you since the beginning of the year?
Writing is the core personal branding skill. It’s the foundation of your branding success.
In addition to forming the basis of your online, offline, and personal branding success. Committing to continuing progress in writing saves you time preparing brand-building articles, blog posts, email, new business proposals, presentations, speeches, and webinars.
Writing multiplies the power of your ideas by showing you how to save time by organizing your ideas before proceeding further.
More important, becoming a comfortable, confident writer opens the door to proven brand-building projects like books and ebooks which remain the best personal branding tools of all. Here are some questions to ask about your recent writing progress:
- Do you find it easier to start writing than you did at the end of last year?
- Are you able to complete an article or blog post in less time, and with less stress, than last year?
- Do you know more about what it takes to write a book or prepare an effective landing page than you did last year?
- Are you any close to writing a book than you were last year?
- Are you explored techniques, like blogging a book, that permit you to simultaneously write and market your book while building your brand?
Everyone can benefit from a midyear evaluation of their personal brand building progress.
Looking back on the first six months of the year can help you achieve even greater personal branding success during the remainder of 2013!
Author:
Roger C. Parker offers advice, counsel, checklists, and worksheets to help you build your personal brand. Download his 99 Questions to Ask Before You Start to Write workbook and ask him a writing question.
