Using WordPress to Craft Your Personal Brand

3 min read

TL;DR: Recording and slides from my brief talk at March's joint WordCampDC and Hacks/Hackers DC MeetUp on leveraging WordPress to craft your personal brand.

❗ Heads up! This post is archived and here for historical purposes. It may no longer be accurate or reflect my views. Proceed at your own risk.

Table of contents

I gave a brief talk at March’s joint WordPress DC and Hacks/Hackers DC MeetUp on leveraging WordPress to craft your personal brand. Below are slides and a recording of the livestream.

I invite you to watch, but in short, the main takeaways were#

In the olden days, people used to be scared to put personal information online; they felt the need to be pseudonymous (see handles like @SparklePrincess87); life online was distinct from life offline.
As more of our analog lives became digital, the need for a second identity diminished; we no longer represent ourselves with anonymous screen names, but rather as ourselves.
Social networking and mobile computing contributed to this shift by interfacing the online and offline worlds. Today’s radical transparency (for example, lifecasters posting pictures of their lunch) shows we have come a full 180.
We shift from corporate brand associations in the ’50s (for example, “I work for IBM”) to personal brands today (for example, “I’m an independent contractor”).
Today we all have a unique opportunity to plant a flag on our corner of the internet, take control of our online identity, and declare to the world who we are by crafting a thought-out narrative.
Unlike in the real world where you are the only one in control of what you say, online, content has a life of its own — you must be proactive.
WordPress makes it dumb simple to tell the world your story.

My five big steps to launching your brand#

Grab a domain
Define your personal brand
Start a blog
Socialize your content
Upgrade your résumé

Recording of the livestream#

Greg Linch opens by discussing WordPress and Journalism, I begin at 30 minutes 10 seconds

For those interested in the plugins mentioned#

Additional Resources#

A special thanks to everyone who was able to come out or follow along on the livestream.

Comments? I’d love to hear your thoughts below.

Originally published March 9, 2011 View revision history

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