Most people hate networking events. If you’re an introvert, you probably avoid them like the plague. But even extraverts can become introverts when faced with a room full of people they don’t know. Networking is a bit like the medicine your doctor gives you: it may taste bad, but you know it’s good for you.

By now, I hope you know that networking is your key to getting a new or better job. I’ll give you a slightly different twist on the reason for this: most hiring managers aren’t too secure about their hiring abilities, so they’re predisposed to take suggestions from others. Sometimes hiring managers are just too lazy to look for the right person. And sometimes the person who’s networked into the organization showed so much imagination and fortitude that they deserve to be hired. (Hint: that should be you.)

So, let me share a basic truth about resume reviews, tests, and all the other screening “stuff” people do. These tests are designed to predict failure, not success. (And that goes for SATs and all the other tests you’ve taken over the years.) If we could predict success as easily as we can predict failure, we’d all be rich.

What does that have to do with networking, or introverts? Most of you aren’t going to get jobs by answering ads on Craigslist or trolling through HotJobs or Monster, which is where introverts like to hang out. The best way to get a job (or a better one) is to get directly to the hiring manager and plead your case. And one of the best ways to do that is by broadening your personal network at events, meetings, etc.

If you agree with that, but you’re still feeling shy, here are some suggestions:

1. 1.  Try to pick a networking venue that meets regularly. Go there a few times – it’s OK to be quiet in the first couple of meetings, but eventually, you’re going to recognize other “regulars,” and you’ll feel generally more comfortable. You’ll become more outgoing automatically.
2. 2.  Make sure you know something about the topic of the meeting – do your homework first! When I first started going to SVASE (Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs) meetings, I didn’t understand much of what people were discussing – but that changed by the 2^nd or 3^rd meeting, because I noted the hot topics, and researched them before going back.
3. Understand the dynamics of small groups – it’s easy to talk to somebody who’s standing alone. Not too bad to get into a group of two people. Much harder to get a discussion going with three people.
4. Live by the rules… I’ve written before about the six seconds you have to introduce yourself. You’ve probably been taught all about the elevator pitch, but that’s not how you introduce yourself! You need a good personal branding statement. Mine is: “Hi, I’m Walt Feigenson, and I help you get found on the Internet.” If yours is crisp and interesting, you will be invited to give your elevator pitch (and keep it to under 30 seconds!).
5. Don’t set your standards too high. Some people will network with everyone in a room, and some with just a few. It’s OK to do whatever is comfortable for you. If you meet 20-30 people in one event, you simply can’t connect with any one of them on a deep enough level to be meaningful.
6. Try to end your meet up with an action item (if the person seems interesting). This could be something as simple as a follow-up email or an oral invitation to link on LinkedIn.
7. When you get home after the event, make a note on each card you collected about where you met the person. Select the people you want to follow up with, and,,, well, you should know the rest.

Here are a couple of useful ideas for anybody, not just introverts:

• Put your picture on your business cards. It’s much easier for somebody you meet to remember your face than your name. You may think this is hokey, but it works.
• Wear your name tag on your right side, not your left. This does two things: 1) it makes it far easier for your new contact to see your name tag when you shake hands, and 2) it’s a subtle indicator that you really know something about networking.

One last thought. There’s more than one kind of networking. I do a lot of public speaking, even though I’m an introvert. For some reason, I’m more comfortable talking to a roomful of people than networking one-on-one. So my networking is through public speaking. One of the key benefits of that is that people come to you for networking, so it’s really easy to establish new friendships. There might be an analog for you, perhaps public service of some kind…Find what works, and make it happen!

Create a Remarkable Web Presence at Brand-Yourself.com

Once you’ve improved your networking skills, it’s time to create a visible web presence to put these networking skills to use. Did you know that more than half of employers are more likely to hire you if you’ve spent time developing your personal brand across social networks? To help you do this, we built a platform to manage your online reputation froCm one central hub. Create your Brand-Yourself account today and see how our tools can help you build, optimize and promote a remarkable web presence that gets you hired.

It’s that time of the year again when we pay tribute to the patriots and radical thinkers that allowed us to break free all those years ago. So while you’re having fun, wherever you may be, keep in mind that just because it’s a holiday doesn’t mean there can’t be lasting repercussions on your personal brand. So with that in mind, here are 2 tips on what TO DO and 2 on what NOT TO DO.

TO DO #1 – Expand your network:
People at parties and holiday events are usually more friendly and open to talking to strangers, use this to your advantage! This doesn’t mean you need to astonish them intellectually, but anyone that you can add to your rolodex or reference in the future is always beneficial. In networking remember to always give value before asking for value – so bring a big blanket for your friends to share with you without telling them beforehand. This is a  great way to meet new people.

NOT TO DO #1- Be careful of the flash:
Not every picture of you online needs to be a professional image.  Just be careful of what’s in the picture with you. A picture is worth a thousand words, not just to you but to the professional world as well, and sometimes your memories are just as vivid.

TO DO #2 – Dust off that elevator speech:
Everyone is at the point now that when you go to a social gathering, you ultimately end up talking about work. To build on the point above, if you want to expand your network you will need an elevator pitch or personal branding statement. Not only will this impress anyone you meet but it will also give you a firm understanding of what you do.

NOT TO DO #2 – Don’t be a “Negative Nancy”
You may have heard this term before, but it more or less describes someone who is always skeptical and never supports other people. You don’t want your personal brand to be known as negative!  When a person starts describing their job  BE INTERESTED and engage them with thoughtful questions. As I mentioned in my last post, being humble and supporting others is a huge part of personal branding.

Author: Trace Cohen

Trace has always been fascinated with technology and how stuff works. Once he gets his hands on a new gadget, rest assured it will be taken apart and put back together in a matter of minutes. Trace is a hands-on kind of guy whose first love was video games, which he loves to this day.

Everybody tells you that you have to have an effective 30-second “elevator pitch.”

They’re wrong – you don’t have anything like 30 seconds to make your first impression on a hiring manager, prospective client, or somebody you meet at a networking event. You have just a few seconds to introduce yourself and recite your personal branding statement.

THEN, if the other person is interested, you can go into your 30-second spiel, but only if they invite you to! If they’re not interested, don’t bother.

That’s why your personal branding statement is so important. When you meet somebody for the first time, they give you permission to politely introduce yourself, probably in a single sentence. You’ll know right away if the other person swallowed the bait by watching their body language and by judging their oral response. If they give you permission to say more, you can and should elaborate – but once again, you have to do that without boring your networking partner.

You can validate this for yourself. Try introducing yourself to somebody with your 30-second speech, and then try the same thing with your 6-second personal branding statement. See which one works better, and if you find that what I’ve said here is wrong, comment on this post and let everyone else know what your experience was.

Your personal branding statement is not your job title! It’s the essence of who you are, distilled to just a few words. Mine is: “I help you get found on the Internet.” That’s simple, succinct, and it’s enough of a teaser to get a response like: “Wow, tell me how you do that.” That’s your invitation to elaborate with your 30-second elevator pitch.

Think about this – if you’ve been in groups where people were developing and practicing their elevator pitches, how often were they sufficiently interesting so that you listened to the whole pitch attentively? How often were they boring, and how often did you finish listening without having the faintest idea what the person really meant?

Brevity begets precision. Stephen Hawking really has to work to communicate, yet he’s one of the most influential scientists in history. He has become a master at crafting his communications with the absolute minimum number of words simply because it takes him so long to create a simple sentence. While you won’t have that challenge, you should be inspired by his precision. You can blabber on for hours once the other person has given you sufficient permission, but until then think about Hawking when you craft your personal branding statement and your elevator pitch.

Your personal branding statement should be short enough to fit on one line on your business card. And you should use it there, in your email signature, in your blog postings or comments, as your LinkedIn Professional Headline, and anywhere else where it’s appropriate to promote yourself.

Author: Walt Feigenson

Mostly, I write about personal branding – especially how it impacts job seekers. But I also write about things I’ve seen during my career, which started with the birth of microcomputers.

For the original article please check out Wally’s Follies

How to brand yourself

Before we can figure out how to brand yourself, let’s first establish what personal branding is.

We use this definition:

“The process of uncovering and marketing your core competencies to meet an audience’s needs, resulting in your financial freedom and fulfillment.”

Understanding how to brand yourself in order to work a job you love involves these vital steps:

• Uncover/Develop your personal brand
• Establish credibility
• Establish niche involvement
• Establish visibility
• Create your career toolkit

Uncover and develop your personal brand

Uncovering your personal brand is your first step. Your brand is how people think and feel about you. Uncovering your brand through self-discovery and soul-searching must happen before anything else. Only after “discovery” does developing a personal brand make sense.

Developing your personal brand does not mean that you are creating some fictitious image. Actually, it is the opposite. It means figuring out who you really are, where you want to go, and how you can help others.

Ask yourself:

• How do people describe you?
• How do you describe yourself?
• What makes you different from your peers?

To determine how to brand yourself, you need to identify:

1. Who is your audience?
2. What do you do better than everyone else?
3. Why do you do what you do? What provides the motivation?
4. How do you stand out from your peers?

Develop your personal branding statement

One of the best ways to determine your personal brand is to craft a personal branding statement. The personal branding statement enables you to draw out your personal brand on paper. You will be left with a concise way of articulating your unique value proposition to others in one or two sentences. This personal branding statement will come in handy when you are assembling your career tool kit. To get down and dirty in discover the foundation of your personal brand, check out our popular post: Everything you need to start building your personal brand right now.

How you answered the questions above determines how you should approach making your personal brand by being more credible, visible and involved.

Establishing Your Brand: Get Visible, Credible and Involved

Visibility, Credibility and Niche Involvement are vital when you’re ready to market your developed personal brand. Without any one of these, your brand will not be as strong.

Establish credibility

Now that you have gone through the initial process of developing your personal brand we can tackle the question “how to brand yourself.” Moving forward we will first focus on making sure that your brand is credible. We put this as the step first because we feel that without a credible brand that everyone will believe, it is not important how visible or involved you are.

So, how do you go about becoming more credible? There are three things you can do online to make yourself more credible and to help brand yourself.

• Publish Articles
  • Publishing articles builds your credibility by spotlighting you as a reliable individual in your area of expertise.
• Maintain a Blog
  • Starting your own blog demonstrates your willingness to contribute back to your niche with your own expertise. Most importantly it shows that you care about a certain topic and are willing to spend time writing about it.
• Contribute to other blogs
  • Many bloggers out there are regularly looking for guest blog posts. Start to know who operates in the blogosphere related to your expertise and reach out to these bloggers.

Establish niche involvement

Being involved in your niche is the next step in figuring out how to brand yourself. After you have proven that you are credible you need to get more involved. You will probably be surprised at how large your niche is and you will soon realize who the major players are.

There are three key things you can do to get involved:

1. Comment on Blogs. Start off by commenting on other blogs out there. It is not useful to post simple comments such as “That was a great post.” Instead, spend a few minutes and put down a useful response that shows your brand in a positive light as well as potentially starting a conversation between yourself and the blogger. Provide insight or an interesting and related fact.
2. Comment on Forums. There are thousands of forums on the web, many relate to your area of expertise. Start by reading forums and contributing feedback to threads. This shows that you are willing to participate in conversations and that you are able to help other people with their questions.  Demonstrate that you are involved and intelligent enough to participate in current dialogs, as well as answer people’s questions.
3. Answer questions on LinkedIn and other Q&A communities. Reach out to others in your niche by tapping into your own experience and expertise and responding to questions in places like LinkedIn Answers or Yahoo! Answers.

Establish visibility

This is one of the more fun stages in your search to answering the question “How to brand yourself?” In the age of the web, a strong brand means little  if nobody can find you. This step in your search to develop your personal brand is where you display for the rest of the world who you are, what you’ve done, and where you exist online.

• Create a profile on social networks such as LinkedIn,  Facebook and Twitter.
• Create a profile on directories such as Naymz, Plaxo and ZoomInfo.
• Vote for your site in social bookmarks like Delicious to improve your position in Google results.

A common pitfall that we see all the time is when someone rushes into a social network and friends everyone they can find, even people they don’t know. Then they never log in again. This is not a good practice. We suggest that you start slowly and carefully. Pick one top-tier place at a time, such as LinkedIn or Facebook. Establish your presence there before bringing another one on board. Just creating a presence is not enough. You have to go through the process of filling in your entire profile – including your bio and a professional headshot. There is nothing worse than coming to someone’s profile that is not cohesively put together or completed.

It is also important that your brand is consistent meaning that you use a common headshot through all networks, and your brand on each of these systems conveys a similar message. It is also important that you can be easily found through search engines.

Create your career toolkit

A career toolkit is a vital step to develop your personal brand. Before you apply for a job, you need to make sure that you have the following items are cohesively put together. I am not going in depth here, but I’ve provided a link to some of our other posts related to each item in your career toolkit:

• Your resume
  • A brief overview of the 5 types of Resumes
  • The key components of a resume
• Your cover letter
  • Writing the perfect cover letter
• Your web presence
  • Tips to Clean Your Social Networking Profiles and Impress Employers
  • Tips to Rank Highly on Google and Increase Your Visibility Online
• Your references
  • Top 5 Articles About Getting Stellar References for Your Job Search
• Your interview skills/preparedness
  • Interviews 101
  • How to Ace Any Type of Interview

If you are not familiar with all aspects of the hiring process you should probably spend a few minutes going over our outline of the job hiring process.

How to Brand Yourself: It’s A Continual Cycle

The above steps will greatly help you figure out how to brand yourself. You will find that as you work to develop your personal brand the process never ends.

You cannot just “create” a personal brand overnight. It is important that you first uncover it, articulate it, and then strengthen it by spending time on each step.

Developing your personal brand means laying the groundwork today for a happier and more successful life later. You have to be genuine to figure out what you want to do, whom you are doing it for, and then market your core competencies in a way that moves others.

Next: Everything You Need to Start Building Your Personal Brand Right Now >

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Brand-Yourself.com is a platform to diagnose, manage and monitor your online reputation for career success. Did you know that 83% of employers use the web to research job applicants? If you’re ready to proactively control your Google results and get hired, rather than cut from the applicant pool, try us for free and start controlling how you’re perceived online. Go ahead. Take our tools for a spin.