Along with the well-marketed loser, brand bandits are other things on the web you need to watch out for! What is a brand bandit?

Brand bandits are a combination of time bandits and personal brand promises. They’re everywhere!  Brand bandits are an attempt to offer you a service to enhance your brand.  But in return, they’re just trying to sneak their name somewhere on your screen real-estate.  Things from ad monetization, to widgets to apps you really don’t need-these are all brand bandits.

Social media is fantastic for building your personal brand.  But if you’re not an educated media user, you might be getting taken advantage of by these brand bandits all over the web!  Use social media in a wise, tactful way.  Don’t let social media outlets become your brand bandits and waste your time!

All niches can be managed!  When talking to my good friend Alex Katsanos, he told me all niches can be managed.  I thought about what he said and it was the perfect statement I needed to hear for my social media efforts.

In the grand scheme of things, a niche is a niche. Niches can be managed. Business people have been doing this since forever to sustain their companies.

How do I manage my own niche?

In relation to social media, programs like tweetdeck make it super easy to manage your personal network across myspace, linkedin, twitter, and facebook.  Keeping up with the latest social media trends, and applications to manage your social media efforts is what counts on a daily basis.

Research

It’s time to be a life-long learner!  Constantly researching ways to stay on top of the game will you’re your niche stick around for short and long term.  Read from credible sources to get the latest and greatest information.  I enjoy reading from popular magazines, academic journals, and government websites.

Peter Drucker was known coining the term “knowledge worker.”  He talked about a knowledge being useful only for a certain amount of time.  Your niche only exists in time.  You’ll need to constantly research how you can make your niche succeed now!

What do you do when you find yourself in someone else’s niche?  Oops, you may have done this by accident.  It’s because you may have not thought out your niche very well.

One of the most common mistakes of personal branding is labeling one’s self with another person’s brand.  It’s like being the rock star groupie who didn’t have the guts to be his own brand.  Sometimes we find ourselves afraid to stand under our own spotlight.  We’re quick to run towards gurus and self-help books.  As soon as you know it, you’re name dropping more than you’d like to.  Your audience cannot tell the difference between you and your favorite author.

What’s the deal?

Grow a backbone and understand it’s worth it to be your own leader.  Quit being that groupie and build your own brand.  This requires self confidence and faith in what you’re doing.

Bottom Line:

When building your niche, just remember to back it up with 100% of you!  Remember, all your efforts are worth you!  Celebrate YOU in your niche!  Gravitate away from those big wigs and roll out your ideas.  People need to see who you are before you can afford to label yourself with other brands!

Once you find your niche and begin to create content around it, you’re going to ask yourself this inevitable question:

What do you want your brand to say?

What message do you want your brand to relay to your audience?  Answering this question is the first step to securing your audience.  If you deliver the messages your audience needs, you will be able to hold their attention to your niche!

Often times, we look at social media and our personal brands.  When you connect the dots, you see that you can use social media to advertise your brand.

But before you can jump onto the social media bandwagon, you need to have a strong sense of your niche and target market.

What’s your niche?

If you’re tired of hearing the question, check this slide show:

Define your niche.  What are you trying to celebrate with your brand?

Once you build that snazzy niche of yours, and you keep your target audience in mind, there are plenty of people who follow it in due time.

Bottom Line:

Don’t get desperate, get caught up with cliché content, nor be a copy-cat. Meditate long and hard on what you want your niche to be.  Your content and audience will always revolve around your niche!

The essence of blogging is to broadcast your brand.  What is blogging?  Essentially, it’s building your brand of ideas.

Your blog posts are a collection of your ideas.  Your blog is a way for you to disseminate your brand of ideas.  Make sure you know what the theme to your niche is.  Make sure you build your ideas around your brand’s theme.

Be sure to check out my case studies of consistent brand builders!

In the new century, keeping up with the fast-paced world is only half of your brand.  Your brand must also be stimulating to the 5 senses.

As video blogs become a popular method of broadcasting your personal brand, I’m starting out with audio blogs.  I hope that the website layout can suffice in visual stimulation while my audio blogs give people something to listen to in the meanwhile.

Other reasons why I’ve chose audio blogs for the time-being:

1. Users can listen to my audio episodes while surfing the web.
2. Instead of having your eyes set on something visual, you can listen to my audio messages and use your mind’s eye to create a picture.
3. Through audio blogs, I introduce the element of storytelling to build my brand.

Feel free to comment on my blog posts.

Your brand a No-Go without generosity!

Your brand will not succeed without generosity!  In this day and age, people will not buy your brand if you do not care about them.  What you offer people without any strings attached is the actual selling of your brand.

Once people have bought into your generosity, then the success of your brand can play out.  Your clients are essentially your audience and your friends.  There is no such thing as a captive audience. But a captivated audience does exist and they are the most powerful element to the success of your brand.  If you can get your audience to believe in you because you’ve earned their respect and their hearts, succeeding with your brand is a walk in the park.  Then you won’t have to worry about selling your brand but rather, you’ll be building it.

My Wall of Gratitude page is a fine example of people who have helped me without expecting anything in return.  Because I am so filled with gratitude for these people, I try to be generous with my resources to their brands.

Generosity is a reciprocal equation for all brand builders who choose to collaborate!  Jason Silvestri, a friend and awesome motivational brand builder created a logo for me.  Not only that, he offered his time in guiding me in my brand building techniques.  To top it off, he was extremely genuine and generous to give me a video shout out.

Generosity is a reciprocal equation for all collaborators! Now do you believe me?

All self help books have something good to say.  But they only give you some answers because your situation is so unique.  You can only take what you need from the body of knowledge offered in these self-help books.

Always remember that those big wigs out there have some good ideas to offer you.  But they can’t own your experience! Your experience becomes a part of your personal brand!

You experience my personal brand everywhere on SanaAhmed.com through my reflections and thoughts.  All of my reflections and thoughts stem from my experiences.  My experiences are part of my personal brand.

Bottom Line:

-Don’t let those big wigs out there claim your experience and your success.

-I promote citing your sources where you do reflect on someone else’s original ideas.

-You can read from all those self-help books and best-selling gurus.  But what you do with that knowledge is your niche, your success, and your brand!

How many people do you know who don’t mean what they say?

I’m here to burst another bubble.  You’re going to encounter a lot of content on the internet which do not mean what they say.  Am I pointing out the obvious? This deceitful content is called spam.  Spam is a part of the web world.  As educated web users, we must learn not to let spam manipulate and mislead us.

Spammy Brands

Spam content breeds poor brands.  You can smell spammy brands from a mile away! As a content producer, don’t become a spam brand!  No one will give your brand credibility.  Most importantly, you won’t own your own work nor be proud of it!

On the other hand, there’s the well-marketed loser who disguises his spam brand into a credible product.  But the well-marketed loser doesn’t mean what he says either.  The well-marketed loser is a more convincing version of spam.   He’s too busy selling you his shallow brand- a brand that could’ve been successful and useful had he believed in what he preached!

The moral of the story is: Don’t let your efforts go to waste.  If you’re going to do something, be sincere about it.  Think about all these spammers and how successful they would be if they weren’t too busy being deceitful.

Avoid being the well-marketed loser:

1. MEAN WHAT YOU SAY!
2. MEAN WHAT YOU DO!
3. YOUR BRAND WILL SUCCEED ACCORDINGLY!