Branding and Personal Branding Is There A Difference?

Well let's start off with the basics.  What is branding?

Here is what wikipedia has to say: The American Marketing Association defines a brand as a "name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller's good or service as distinct from those of other sellers. The legal term for brand is trademark. A brand may identify one item, a family of items, or all items of that seller. If used for the firm as a whole, the preferred term is trade name.

Now you might want to know what is personal branding?
Once again here's what Wikipedia has to say:  Personal branding is, for some people, a description of the process whereby people and their careers are marked as brands.

There has been a lot of discussion on the Internet lately of why it has become so popular to Personally Brand pages that are being shown or advertised on Traffic Exchanges.

Know rap your head around this,  user name job123, is advertising a long drawn out page that happens to be very popular. OK you have seen this page half a thousand times now and have no way to distinguish between job123's page or anyone Else's.  Reflect upon the results of the advertising,
job123=0 Program owner =100%. Here's the next fact, you
have now either read the page or were to bored by the long drawn out page to actually look at it, but somehow you have decided you are going to join. So you either type in the site address or click the link the next time you see the page.

Final results are the program owner just got another sign up and poor job123 did all the work with nothing to show!

Let's look at the same situation but this time use Personal Branding and Social Marketing.

Job123 has made a splash page for the same opportunity, He has made it so that it stands out and stops you from clicking away to the next page and it has interested you to find out more. Now Job123 has also added his real picture and Name!  Joe is in a traffic exchange and you have recognised him from his picture and you ask him about that page and the opportunity, Why you were already interested in it but the difference is you know who Joe is! Joe has now accomplished generating a referral for the opp, but more importantly he has associated himself to the promotion....

So what we have is setting himself out as being different from everyone else promoting that opportunity. This is the power behind Personal Branding and Social Marketing.

What's The Relationship Worth!

A relationship cannot have a dollar amount put on it. Developing a long lasting relationship is probally the most important thing I have done for my on line business.

It's not just about helping people out because even a phoney can do that. It's the way you treat someone after the trust has been established, that's what counts.

It's a hard thing not hiding from bad news. This is something that you will all go through. Especially when you lead a team and those people look and count on you for answers. As a leader it's great to be able to report all the wonderful things, and the congratulations. I love that.

When I was told of problems and looked into it and couldn't find the answer to the problem, I wrestled with it trying to find the answer and then when I couldn't to report that news as well.  I worried about the reputation I had built up and what would happen to it.

It occurred to me the only way to handle it was to be up front, honest and make the recommendation that no one really wanted to hear. It was the only way for me to maintain that reputation I worked so hard to build.

I have to tell you that the bad news I reported was taken in and the recommendations were agreed upon and everything as far as the individual relationships with the people involved went on as if nothing had happened.

So there is your lesson from the Professor for today.

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