25 Easy Ways To Grow Your Personal Brand in 5 Minutes

Here are some ideas of quick personal brand-building steps you can take right now.

Use this as a checklist to challenge yourself daily for the next few weeks.

1. Create a Yodio, recording yourself telling a story about an image. Put it on your blog, or better yet, propose it as guest content to a brand-related blogger.
2. Take a quick survey of passers-by on the street, introducing yourself as you go. Ask a question that tugs at their emotions while relating to your niche.
3. Start an industry-related petition.
4. Ask a question on LinkedIn Answers, WikiAnswers or another Q&A-type site.
5. Answer a question on LinkedIn Answers, WikiAnswers or another Q&A-type site.
6. Contact a small, industry blogger with feedback or an article topic suggestion.
7. Call a local school, association, community center or company to offer a free lecture/workshop on your topic of expertise.
8. Make a video of yourself answering a question and upload it to YouTube.
9. Make a screencast showing step-by-step how to deal with a common problem in your industry, and upload that to YouTube.
10. Call in with an answer OR a question to a relevant radio show, analog or web-based.
11. Start a thread asking a question in a popular online forum, chatroom, Facebook group or mailing list.
12. Update your avatar across your preferred social networks.
13. Share an article with someone who really needs it.
14. Post an insightful comment on a leading blog’s most recent article.
15. Register your own domain name, and redirect it to your LinkedIn profile until you have your own website.
16. Post an update on whichever social network you focus on most, such as Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn.
17. Update your email/forum signature.
18. Add applications to your LinkedIn profile to show off your achievements.
19. Contact a famous person about interviewing them for your or someone else’s blog, podcast, tv show, etc.
20. Start a public Twitter List of favorite impressive people in your field.
21. Make sure your major online profiles are all using the same tagline and other branding information.
22. Create a Facebook Page for your personal brand.
23. Reach out to someone you’d like to meet by sending a note of appreciation and a question about a recent success of theirs.
24. Ask some of your online followers/subscribers/friends if they have a question for you.
25. Stumble and review an article on Stumbleupon, then leave a comment on the article saying you did so.

Author:

Jacob Share, a job search expert, is the creator of JobMob, one of the biggest blogs in the world about finding jobs. Follow him on Twitter for job search tips and humor.