For most writers, branding is a personal matter. In order to sell your words, you need to market yourself and get some public recognition.

Whether you are selling books, screenplays, poems, freelance services, fiction, non fiction or anything in between, if nobody knows your name then sales may be a little hard to find.

Although your initial thought may be to register a new domain and use it as a showcase for your work, there are a number of factors working against you which mean you need to cast your net a little wider to get attention. As a new site with little reputation, search engines are likely to ignore your masterpiece and bury you on page 300 for any halfway decent keyword terms.

There are plenty of strategies and techniques to increase your reputation, most of which rely on creating links to your site from other sites that have already established reputations. Most sites guard their reputation carefully and will hesitate to give “link love” to newbies.

Lets take a look around at some techniques for personal self promotion that will help get your name noticed. Like most things, you can either be sneaky or upfront about your methods. “White Hats” only use pure and “proper” methods of self promotion, while “Black Hats” will try anything and everything to gain “link juice”. Of course there are all sorts of shades of grey in between, and definitions can become rather fluid as the rhetoric heats up. Some of the methods I’m going to describe might be considered slightly grey, depending on where you are standing, although as Einstein said, “its all relative”.

Squidoo.com

Squidoo is a great way to support your writing. Simply create a new account & write an overview in its own lens. If you write on a variety of topics, create a lens for each topic. Tag the lenses as much as possible & also join as many groups as possible. Next interlink all the lenses together using a links plexo module. Now also link back to your writing website with the anchor text you want to rank for from each lens.

A similar strategy can be followed on other writing sites, see our post titled Get into Pay per View for writing profits
for more information on these sites.

Flood the Search results

Are you wanting to rank for a particular term such as your name, or the name of your book? Then dominate that term by flooding the net with as many of your own targeted pages as you can on popular sites. All linking back to your original site.

I.e.

http://www.myspace.com/MyDomainNameGoesHere

Register a page on:

• Squidoo
• Googlepages
• Blogspot
• Myspace
• Wordpress
• Typepad
• Spaces.Live.com
• Feedburner
• Facebook

Register User Profiles on:

• Digg
• Mybloglog
• blogcatalog
• Bumpzee
• SEO Moz
• Stumbleupon
• Last.fm

Use all these relevant pages to link back to your own site, which will help increase your ranking for that targeted keyword.

Forums and Groups

Register on related forums and groups. Set your signature with the anchor text you want to rank for. Make helpful posts and you will begin to be seen as an authority within that community. Remember that in most online forums and groups the active posters are only the tip of the iceberg. Lurkers make up the bulk of the traffic, and well ranked forums often turn up in search results. This can be a very time consuming and it may be better to concentrate your efforts on a few forums at a time, where you can build up a larger body of posts rather than spreading yourself too thin.

Within a few months you should be able to see a noticeable growth in your traffic. Watch out for some more traffic tactics coming soon, and info on how to track the growth and visitors to your site. The best way to keep up to date with new posts is to click on the RSS button and add us to your feed reader.

have any great personal branding tips? Tell us about it in the comments below.