Friday, November 18, 2011

How to Make Money Online: Create Your Personal Brand

Whether you are a freelancer, blogger, webmaster, web merchant, mechanical turker, or some other aspiring web worker, you must demonstrate your value to the internet and the people who use it. It's all about eyeballs and getting users to view your content or use your products or services. To accomplish this, you must create your niche, or in other words, your own personal brand that is unique to you and offers something to users that others don't. Doing this is a complex undertaking.

Setting yourself apart is crucial for creating a unique and desirable brand. Doing this involves much more than just creating your logo or a flashy website. It's about carving out your niche and making it obvious why your approach is different and more beneficial than the next guy, or gal. It's important to remember that you cannot just build it and they will come. You must build something better for people to leave what they are currently using to use your website.

On that note, if what you're doing online doesn't create net benefits to your target user, they simply won't come back and will not use your service and you won't be very successful. I know what I'm saying here is a bit vague so let me get more specific.

To start building your personal brand you want to research your direct competition extensively. First, determine how much competition there is. Is your niche already too saturated? Are there opportunities to offer something different, or better than your competion? Determine what needs similar content or sites are serving. Are they doing it well? Are they under serving the community and if so, how? Find the under served areas of your niche and serve them!

If you're a freelancer this means offering services not offered by your competition or better customer service. If you're a blogger this means exploiting the weak areas of information in your chosen topic and creating a brand. For instance, if you're writing about cats, how is your topic different and honestly ask yourself or an impartial third party if you or they would visit your website and more importantly, come back again and again? If you say no, stop. Rethink, reorganize, redo what you were doing. This retooling of your approach to find what draws visitors back is necessary because repeat users are the key to a successful web business. If you need an example of a company that does this well look no further than Facebook.

Above all, be honest with yourself, don't let your pride get in the way! Believe me, I've done this far too many times and it never works out. If what you're doing isn't working, change, because the key to creating your personal brand is having the humility to admit when you're wrong and change when you need to.

Best of luck to all of you and here's hoping your future online income is great and your difficulties are small.

Thanks for reading!

~Justin

Read more online money making tips and how to avoid scams at the No BS Zone. I'm dedicated to educating people about legitimate ways to make an income online!