Building your personal brand and establishing a presence online is very important. Just think of the ecelebrities such as Robert Scoble, Kevin Rose and of course some of the others I covered in failing up and marketing yourself. Maybe you have never heard of them, or maybe your obsessed with them like iJustine or Julia Alison. Either way they all have a personal brand. Each of them have a large twitter following and have established a name for themselves on the interwebs.

Personal Marketing is very important in the blogging/web world. Online marketing is all about branding. Think of the web 2.0 buzz/crazy, it’s all about branding. Think of those sites you hit up everyday, digg, del.icio.us, reddit, Web 2.0 is all branding and bloggers, its all about personal branding. If you are either starting out or trying to build up readers you need to make yourself and “expert” as well as promote your name/brand. Think of the top bloggers who are REALLY making money, John Chow, Steve Pavlian, Shoemoney, and even Michael Arlington who started techcrunch. Okay, so how go about building up this personal branding?

1. Buy the Domain of Your Name

This is obviously getting harder and harder to get, but I HIGHLY encourage you to pickup your name as in (firstnamelastname.com) for me, it’s JohnMurch.com. Building up this personal brand you can start a blog and/or promote some of the things you do in life (or are an “expert” in). Blogging helps create that personal connection to readers as well as promote yourself and have a “very nice” Google Ranking because its based on your name.

2. Create a Tag Line

I have tried a couple of various tags lines in the past couple of years and some of them were for the good and bad. While I was using the “Geek Guru” tag line, I actually had someone complain that I was too young to be a guru in anything, yea imagine that. I guess they forget to tell people like Zuckerberg that he was too young to own a billion dollar business. Either way, you need to create a brand and easy elevator pitch. I am starting to take this a bit more serious and suggest others do as well. I am rebranding myself as offer “Daily Growth for the Everyday Entrepreneur”.

3. Unique Business Cards

I totally failed on this one when I got started, but since then recovered and not only have a personal branded business card, but also ones for each of my startups. So take this lesson from my past experiences, people care about business cards and you should focus some time on creating the brand and getting these cards professionally made of high quality stock. I use overnight print, you can find their advertisement on my blog.

I once had a guy at a networking event go off on my business card since I was printing my own. For myself, it’s just your contact information, but others are just hung up on this as a way of delivering a message. For those who are networking 2.0 and want to work a room in little to no time checkout contxts. Contxts offers a way to text your information to someone just by offering up a keyphrase. For example just text johnmurch to 50500 and you will get all my information. Great for when you run out of cards but still want to easily connect.

4. Join the Conversation

If you are not on Twitter, signup now. Seriously, what better way to market and promote yourself then to build a following and engage people in 140 characters or less. You should also be posting comments on various blogs as well as interacting with your blog readers.

5. Do Something Unique

No matter if it’s wearing yellow shoes or have a large personality do something unique. This is an area that I too am struggling, but know that it’s important to separate yourself and do something unique. So with that I plan to make it a goal to be a bit more unique and separate myself from the sheep.